Some good stuff from Peter Drucker

I mentioned a while back that I had just finished a few management books. I'm planning on blogging a few (OK, maybe more than a few!) excerpts from Peter Drucker's The Essential Drucker which is a collection of his essays from about 50 years. It is amazing to me how relevant most of them are to the church. Maybe that's because he believed in the human element of management. Anyway, here's the first of several:

“We talk incessantly about 'teams'—and every study comes to the conclusion that the top management job does indeed require a team. Yet we now practice—and not only in American industry—the most extreme 'personality cult' of CEO supermen. And no one seems to pay the slightest attention in our present worship of these larger-than-life CEOs to the question of how and by what process they are to be succeeded—and yet, succession has always been the ultimate test of any top management and the ultimate test of any institution”— The Essential Drucker, page 76

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In the preceding paragraph he specifically mentions the church...how appropriate, eh? In our world of super-pastors and super-authors, but no thought of shared leadership, his statement is especially damning. The church—to her own hurt—is just as enamored with worldly success as the world. We may cry out “Where is the God of Elijah,” but God is asking us “Where are the Elijahs of God?” Unfortunately, we cultivate a personality cult instead of a relationship with the living God. The heavens are brass, but we gladly substitute the latest paperback by so-and-so on how to live the christian life instead of seeking the only one who can live the Christian life—God via the Holy Spirit!
</idle musing>