"Onward" a better Call to Action?

While I do not plan to blog each week about the book I am reading, the latest book I have read, "Onward" by Howard Schultz feels particularly fitting for the church.  The book is written, with help of course, by the CEO of Starbucks who talks about how he came back as CEO as Starbucks and the economy were in the midst of a downward spiral and eventually managed to turn Starbucks around even as the economy continued to languish.

Obviously the recession was not good for Starbucks, but Schultz's feeling is that Starbucks was hurting even before then and the economic downturn only magnified or perhaps revealed flaws that were already present.  In fact he really seems to feel that the past success of Starbucks and its rapid growth became a barrier to its further healthy growth as a company.  In the midst of massive store openings and rampant success Starbucks began to lose focus on its innovation and even its core value of providing great coffee and a community environment, a "third space."

Starbucks was able to turn itself around in part because it stopped resting on its past success, it stopped allowing pressure for further such growth to distract it and instead returned to its core purpose as a company.  Could we in the church learn something from this?  One of the challenges is that denominationally and even at a local church level we lack someone with that same level of power that a CEO tends to have.  We also lack the same focus on a few core things.  While we have powerful statements like "making disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world" they lack the concreteness that would actually help us know what we as a church are supposed to be doing.  Are we meant to be a "third space" in the community like Starbucks?  Can we even compete with companies in that realm?  How do we know when we have made a disciple or transformed the world?  While Jesus gave us really big goals to shoot for, I think to turn the church around we need to hone in on what we are really trying to do.

For the last 40 years mainline churches have been declining in worship attendance and in membership.  Why this is happening is the subject of numerous books, but perhaps just as telling is I am not sure we could actually say why this matters.  Can we actually point to the fact that our decline numbers MEAN we are failing to make disciples or transform the world.  Thanks to our obsession with reporting in the UMC we can say that we have fewer professions of faith, one measure of discipleship and we could also look at our churchwide giving to various missions, one way of transforming the world.  Do these actually tell the whole story?  Maybe we as a church need some concrete sense of what we are going to try and do, what difference we are seeking to make in people's lives, then we would know what to be focused on, what we can look at cutting, and maybe be able in the future to see how things begin to turn around.