What's God Got to Do with It--control and command management style

I'm continually confounded by church organizations that are run according to the old command and control management style. You know the style--it's pyramidal, with control starting from the top and moving down, preventing individual freedom and encouraging homogeneity, saying "no" more than "yes," and generally keeping the lid on creativity. Yes, I'm talking about mainline protestant churches and church organizations that shall remain unnamed in this post. How do you go about loosening them up, encouraging more openness, more transparency, more flat organizational accountabilities, more ability of the people who are doing the work having the authority to made decisions, including financial decisions about their areas. Shall we offer more training, more organization development consulting? I'm afraid these initiatives are doomed to failure.

The aha moment I had recently was that the problem is not practical or managerial but theological. We have created organizational structures to match our perception of God. Those who believe in an "omni" God (omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, who is never changing, perfect and beyond passion, those are the ones who are stuck in an organization that mirrors that construction of God: Controlling, Punishing, rewarding, Demanding, Inaccessible--like the angry god in the picture above.

I think it takes a theological reformation to recognize that God might be primarily: Creative, Relational, Loving, Freeing/empowering, Vulnerable, Changing, Discernible, Transforming. Then we might be able to recognize the ability of an organization to organize itself around the gifts and passions of its people and to be a good steward of its capital resources for the sake of its people and of the environment.

It takes a nod to process and liberationist theology to move an organization forward into a future-thinking mode so that something creative can happen to open up a church or church agency to love and relationality.

My reading of Catherin Keller's new book, On the Mystery (Fortress, 2008) helped me to begin thinking about the connection between theology and management styles. What do you think?