From Franchise to Family

As I look around the landscape of Christianity today, I notice that many of the churches having the greatest impact tend to have this in common: there is a strong family dynamic present at their core. This has been a point of intrigue for me, and I’ve been exploring the value of a family-based model in the overall health and effectiveness of the church. In our Catholic parishes, we often use the language of family, but if we look at the specifics, I think it’s more accurate to say we function much more like franchises than families. While this certainly comes with advantages, there are also significant limitations.

Commercially, the franchise approach relies on easily repeatable patterns for maximum expansion. McDonald’s is the premier example. Every McDonald’s has the same decor, offers the same menu, and has basically the same organizational structure. This has been a key in the success of McDonald’s and other franchise-oriented organizations like it. In this sense, we can see that perhaps the franchise approach has been a contributing factor to the spread of the Catholic Church all over the world. We have our own repeatable patterns and structures, right down to the uniformity of the liturgy, with the same prayers, seasons, and colors being used across the globe. This contributes to a sense of unity and stability in the church; there's comfort in knowing I can get basically the same Sunday Mass experience anywhere in the world, just like I know exactly what to expect from my Starbucks latte anywhere I travel!

But there are downsides to the franchise model as well. Most notably, because a franchise is built on a system of interchangeable parts, there is a danger that people will be treated as just another one of those interchangeable parts. The roles within a franchise are clearly defined, and if one person leaves, another can easily be trained up to take his/her place with little loss of productivity in between. I think there is something of this dynamic present in the way that priests in many dioceses are routinely moved to new assignments. This constant cycle of pushing “reset” on a parish by changing pastors every 6-12 years is destabilizing for priests and parishioners alike. As one article puts it, “Without a real stability of office, can a pastor be a true pastor, or a true father in any real sense?”

FRANCHISE VS. FAMILY

The core difference between a franchise mentality and a family mentality is this: a franchise is organized around structure, while families are formed around people, specifically fathers and mothers. In a family, no person is replaceable. Each member has a unique value simply because of who they are, irrespective of whatever contribution they offer. The family is the space where each member grows and has the opportunity to emerge into the fullness of their identity, and the success of one member is shared by all and celebrated as a success for the entire family.

How is it that this family dynamic develops? It is through the role that fathers and mothers play. Within families, fathers and mothers love their children uniquely and individually simply because they are their children. And the ambition of every good father and mother is not that their children should serve them and their goals perpetually, but that their children should become fathers and mothers in their own right. This creates a culture where the children not only grow to walk in the fullness of who God created them to be, but it also positions them for bringing maximum impact through their unique calling and for sowing into future generations.

A CASE STUDY: JESUS CULTURE

What might this look like in the context of church? I think the origin story of Jesus Culture Church in Sacramento, CA is a great case study. Banning Liebscher, the pastor of Jesus Culture Church, started out as a youth minister at Bethel Church in Redding, CA. It was there that Jesus Culture first began to develop as a youth movement. Liebscher empowered teenagers to lead worship at their youth gatherings, to develop their own songs and sound, and to begin recording albums. Eventually, this team began to put on conferences, first in their home city but then eventually all over the country. It became increasingly evident over time that the movement Liebscher was leading was bigger than a youth group, and after 18 years at Bethel Church the entire Jesus Culture team moved to Sacramento to plant a church there.

What I love about this story is the way that Liebscher was given space to grow and develop within Bethel Church. I'm not sure that those involved in the process would describe it this way, but it's almost as if there was a church growing within a church. It might be likened to pregnancy, where a person is literally growing within a person. And like pregnancy, I wonder if there wasn't even a little discomfort during the late stages of Jesus Culture's incubation! But rather than viewing this emerging movement as competition, Bethel cultivated it and championed it until the time was right for it to be birthed as an independent expression. Bethel even sent one of its senior leaders with Jesus Culture as a mentor and a sort of grandfather to the movement that Liebscher was now fathering.

CREATING HEALTHY FAMILY

So what can we glean from family-based models such as these? While we may be limited in how much of the overarching Church system we can adjust, I do believe it’s possible to create a healthy family culture within the Catholic Church. We can do this by embracing our own call to be fathers and mothers who raise up fathers and mothers.

To that end, I want to leave you with one guiding principle: anointing rests on people, not on structures.

Structures are useful only to the extent that they support the anointing that people carry. Any time we prioritize structure over people, we are operating outside of (at best) or in opposition to (at worst) God's purposes. For God Himself is a Father who is invested in His children and in seeing them develop into their full potential.

All of the great movements in Church history have taken the form of an anointed leader creating healthy family. Consider St. Francis, for example, who more-or-less accidentally founded the Franciscan order because of the sheer attraction of his passion for God. I don't think St. Francis ever angled for gathering followers, but rather than deflecting those who gathered to him, he embraced them and the responsibility to be a father to them. And this impacted the lives of countless people for generations.

So in whatever measure we have influence over others, the single most important question we should be asking is, “What is the anointing that God has placed on their life, and how can I create space for that anointing to grow and develop?”

This may require some strategy and sacrifice, and it may lead to some outside-of-the-box results. But in creating the space for individuals to be loved and championed, we not only enable them to thrive and grow into their fullness, but we also give space for God to move in fresh ways and advance His Kingdom to reach corners of the world that He wouldn’t otherwise be able to.