Management Culture and Human Dignity

Last updated on: March 13, 2015 at 8:08 pm by Robert Hunt

Management Culture and Human Dignity 2015-03-13T20:08:04-06:00 Robert Hunt

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

The culture of modern North America is a management culture. That culture has its roots deep in the enlightenment and the emergence of the human as an autonomous, independent center of power, meaning, and authority. American Christianity, particularly in its United Methodist form, is indigenous to North American society and fully participates fully in this management culture.

The need for a management culture emerges with the post-enlightenment self-understanding of humanity. Indeed, despite the rise of a competing romantic culture of intuition and the occasional re-emergence of nihilism, management culture is the only culture through which humans appear to be able to confidently exercise the complete power and authority they have abrogated to themselves in order to continue to order their lives toward mere survival as a species.

The evidence of a management culture in the church is pervasive, as is the culture. An obsession with measurement and statistics, the only means by which humans as such can escape superstition and intuition, grips the episcopal leadership. Pastors and lay leaders in local congregations define their roles as managers by spending most of their time in goal setting, strategizing, planning, and finally implementing programs. Congregations themselves are organized primarily to purvey social and personal management programs to their own members and the broader society.

But nowhere is management culture more strangely at work than in worship, which like every other program of the church has become one of the many strategies deployed by a congregation to reach its management goals.

In its most respectable form this management of worship asserts that the goal of worship is to transform human persons so that they will better serve their fellow human beings. “All worship ends in service.” In its least respectable form the management of worship aims at marketing the church experience as a combination of theo-therapy, entertainment, and motivational speaking for every possible demographic niche in our American market.

Either way worship is an activity planned by humans to affect humans in specific ways to achieve humanly conceived goals. The simple praise and worship of God isn’t enough, for worship ultimately ends up directing our attention back to humans and human needs.

So wrapped are we in our human autonomy it is hard to imagine how we might escape the gift and demand of being managers of our society and destiny. Does not every human action begin with a human decision? Does not the failure to act or plan simply make us vulnerable to the manipulation by those who do? Perhaps. So in the seven day a week church we end up dragging Monday into Sunday.

Yet perhaps we should imagine a human decision that gives us a human dignity of a different order than that offered by our management culture. Perhaps we should keep a sabbath from the work of management.

We can decide to sit in silence and await God’s voice like the Quakers, or conform to ancient liturgies that have shaped humans across vastly different cultures instead writing our own, or submit to the rise of untamed emotions elicited by (even our own!) hot preaching, loud music, and tightly packed crowds. We can yield to a code of righteousness that we did not create and we do not fully understand. We can at the very least stand in the midst of vast human suffering and the terrible destructive power of nature and shake our fists at God and lay our justifiable claims as creatures upon our Creator.

Far better this last than our pious muttering “thy will be done:” which far from being a submission to God’s sovereignty has become a feeble replacement for a robust amen and a sign of either the ludicrousness of our theology of prayer or the poverty of our faith.

We can decide to quit managing; to acknowledge who we really are as humans on the sabbath created for us. We can take a sabbath from being in charge of everything, and with God, rest.

Of course, when we keep the sabbath it should be in the full knowledge that the pioneer and perfecter of our faith did so as well. His preparation began in the garden of Gethsemane. We know how it ended. He did indeed become the victim of those who never gave up managing.

So the risk abounds that if we do not manage ourselves and our world, we will be managed. Yet if we want to rise to a different level of human dignity than that offered by managing our way to survival and success, Jesus offers the way to be lifted up.

Christian Identity

Previous Post

June 9, 2013

Dialogue, Politics, and the Muslim World

Next Post

June 25, 2013 The Indigenous American Religion

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category Christian Identity Christian Muslim Relations Home Page Inter-Religious Dialogue Uncategorized

Select a Month September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 July 2010 May 2010

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz