There’s an excellent post from Skye Jethani today which hits close to home for me in a number of ways. First off, he’s taking a lesson from the redundancy that is built in to airplanes, making them the safest way to travel. (I’m a certification engineer at an avionics company, so I am very familiar with what he’s talking about.) Second, he asks what the church should be learning on this issue. It is wise to structure a large church organization around a “main man”?

(This also hits home because there was a time in my history when I was told that I would cause great damage to my particular church if I chose to follow what I felt was God’s leading to go elsewhere. I wasn’t the pastor - only an elder and part-time worship leader. I went ahead and left anyway. The church, of course, was fine. But that’s a different story.)

Jethani is asking questions about places like Bethlehem Baptist (John Piper) and Redeemer NYC (Tim Keller), both of which are large organizations built around single, superstar pastors. (Other churches quickly come to mind - Mars Hill Seattle (Mark Driscoll), for instance.)

…whenever I’ve discussed this inherent danger [of a single failure affecting multiple congregations] with those operating video-based multi-site systems they invariably mention the efficiency and effectiveness of their model. Who can disagree? Utilizing one highly gifted person to impact thousands of people in multiple cities is unquestionably efficient….

But who decided that efficiency and effectiveness were the highest values for ministry?

Boom. Awesome question. Jethani goes on to enumerate some reasons why a more redundant, less efficient organization might well be healthier for churches. It’s worth a read.

And oh, yeah - about those airplanes? Some of the most amazing safety engineering ever done happens on those aircraft. They include redundancy in ways you’d never imagine. Very cool stuff.