There are times when I feel like I’m two different people living in one body. During the day I’m a professional analyst working with Fortune 100 companies stopping internet fraud and trademark abuse. I am relentless in the pursuit of perfection and hold those around me to a high standard with an eye towards details.

Once the work ring rings and evening comes, Mr. Hyde goes into hiding, making way for a relaxed, big-picture, errors-don’t-matter-that-much Pastor Jekyll.

In thinking about this personal shift, I couldn’t help but reflect on the Hyde-virus surging through the veins of the Jesus’ Bride. Over the past several decades there has been a barrage of corporate leadership teachings thrown at the church in the USA (and, to a certain extent, those elsewhere).

These corporate leadership teachings have taught pastors and church leaders to consider the ‘church’ as a business. As while there is a grain of truth in this (i.e. a local church does deal with money, own property, etc.), it is far from the concept of “ekklesia” outlined by King Jesus.

“Ekklesia” is the Greek word used in the New Testament that is normally translated as ‘church’. However, literally the word means “calling out” (‘ek’ = ‘out’ and ‘kaleo’ = ‘call’) and was used as a political term to describe “assembly of the people convened at the public place of the council for the purpose of deliberating.” Or, in different words, the church is a group of people who are called out of the Old Age in order to tell/show the people around them about the King of Heaven and Earth.

If you will notice, this view of the church does not lend itself to business principles or a corporate mentality as the church is less of an organization and more of a gathering of people. And, as a gathering of people, the church has the primary goal of being known as follower of Jesus via their love for each other (John 13:35).

This mandate to love people lends itself to some interesting practical applications. Namely, if the focus of the church is on the people, then we have to be careful with our Mr. Hyde professional personalities and instead foster the Pastor Jekyll personalities.

An example of this came up in our church not too long ago during a leadership meeting. We were talking about volunteers and some of the different events hosted by the church when someone made the comment about how difficult it was to make sure the events were professional and looked good when various volunteers had a tendency to drop the ball.  On the surface this is a fairly normal criticism of any non-profit working with volunteers, whether they be the church, the PTO, Boy Scouts or a homeless shelter. By definitions, volunteers are just that ‘volunteers’ with no or very little incentives to complete a task (an employee, on the other hand, has to complete the task or get fired).

Yet if we evaluate the comment along the lines of the purpose and goal of the church, we see that the mentality behind it is askew and is more in line with Mr. Hyde than Pastor Jekyll.

The focus of the church should not be on ‘looking good’ or putting on professional events, but on walking with people through the journey of life. This means giving people a chance to play (i.e. be a part of putting on the event) and allowing them to fail, even if it means looking bad or having to scramble at the last minute to complete something. Again, the focus in on loving the person and not having things go perfect.

This is not to say that we are to give up on doing things professionally and settle for half-baked things. Far for it!! King Jesus wants all of us, including all of our talents and energy – which will lend itself to having good, solid professional events and items. What I’m talking about is the mentality that is so focused on the job that it forgets about the people and walks over them in an effort to look good for Jesus.

No, instead of falling prey to the virus of corporatism in our churches, we need to promote our relaxed, big-picture, errors-don’t-matter-that-much Pastor Jekyll side and love people like Jesus told us too. And if things don’t go right all the time and mistakes are made; well, so what? We will just fix them together and keep on walking after Jesus.