Leadership Network encourages evangelical leaders to spend a year learning the best business management practices of Peter Drucker. Leadership Network is a “Non profit 501c3 donor supported ministry organized in the United States.” In a 2011 article called “Drucker’s Discipleship” and the book Hath God Said? Emergent Church Theology, I documented how the genesis of the Emergent Church can be traced back to an organization called Leadership Network. This organization was introduced as a resource to help leaders of innovative postmodern churches to connect. Mark Driscoll and Brian McLaren both retell the involvement of Leadership Network in the origin of the Emerging Church movement.
In the early 1990s, Bob Buford funded Leadership Network to bring together the leaders of megachurches around the country. Buford is not only the founder of Leadership Network but also founded the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management. Buford referred to Drucker as the “wisest men alive” and has often expressed his deep admiration for Drucker. It is no surprise that his organization Leadership Network is now encouraging their followers to spend a year under Drucker’s tutelage.
Bob Buford happens to have a lot in common with influential megachurch pastors Rick Warren (Founder and Senior Pastor of Saddleback Church) and Bill Hybels (Founder and Senior Pastor of Willow Creek Community Church). Some have referred to these three men as the Druckerite trinity because of their relationships with business management guru Peter Drucker. The management guru had great influence upon Buford, Hybels, and Warren. The source of their success is Drucker, not Christ.
For example, in the article “Saddleback Going Global Again“, I reported how Stephen Lee was be pastoring the Purpose Driven Hong Kong campus. Lee first met Rick Warren in 2006 “because he has heard so much about him during his time working as the CEO of Peter Drucker Academy, the first private company registered in China as a charity organization.” It is this shared love for Drucker that brought the two together. Stephen Lee says:
Ordinary people make a difference. Ordinary people do extraordinary things. It comes from Peter Drucker. I am able to agree to this in such short time and with only a month of training because I know Peter Drucker in-depth. Saddleback Church and Rick Warren stand for the same. (source)
The extraordinary megachurches of Rick Warren and Bill Hybels, and the extraordinary Emerging Church movement birthed by Leadership Network have a commonality: Peter Drucker. Ordinary people can implement the business management practices into their church much like a franchise system in order to make it extraordinary. Out of Lee’s own mouth, the source of their success is Drucker.
I am subscribed to the Leadership Network e-mail list. Yesterday I received an e-mail from Leadership Network with a link to an article by Warren Bird called “How Evangelical Leaders Can Spend a Year Learning from Peter Drucker.” The article is promoting a new book, A Year with Peter Drucker: 52 Weeks of Coaching for Leadership Effectiveness, which “makes Drucker’s ideas accessible in bite-size excerpts.” Leadership Network is unashamedly promoting Peter Drucker’s work in business management. Bird writes:
If you’ve ever used the words decentralization, knowledge worker, management by objectives, orprivatization, you’ve been influenced by Peter Drucker, who coined all of them – and more. In the church world, if your ministry has been impacted by Rick Warren and Saddleback Church, Chuck Smith and Calvary Chapel, or Bill Hybels and Willow Creek Church, then you’ve also been influenced by Drucker, who developed a significant mentoring relationship with each of these leaders and organizations.
Drucker (1909-2005), who described himself as a “social ecologist,” was also a personal mentor for more than 25 years to Leadership Network co-founder Bob Buford, whose most recent book, Drucker & Me, highlights Drucker’s relationship to Leadership Network and to various evangelical church leaders. Events sponsored by Leadership Network often featured Drucker as a speaker, offering opportunities to meet with Drucker in small groups over shared meals.
Peter Drucker was born in 1909 in Austria and immigrated to America in 1937. He was a writer, management consultant, and self-described “social ecologist.” Drucker had taught at California’s Claremont Graduate School for more than 30 years, where the Management Center carries on his name. He published over thirty books in addition to articles for the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, and Forbes. His books and popular scholarly articles explored how people are organized across the business, government and the nonprofit sectors of society.
Drucker’s writings were characterized by a focus on relationships among people rather than number crunching. Before his death in 2005, he rose to a position of great esteem for his contributions to business and management. In fact, he had a worldwide reputation as “the father of modern management.” When it comes to management theory and practice, Drucker is one of the most widely influential thinkers and writers on the subject. Drucker made time to consult with business leaders as well as government and nonprofit organizations.
What does Peter Drucker have to do with church leadership? Why is Leadership Network promoting Drucker’s work? I have clearly documented the answers to these questions in the lengthy article “Drucker’s Discipleship” and the 3-hour documentary film Church of Tares: Purpose Driven, Seeker-Sensitive, Church Growth & New World Order.
The Leadership Network article boasts:
Evangelical readers will find particular interest in Maciariello’s choice of topics in his week-by-week clustering. An entire section is titled “Developing Oneself from Success to Significance.” (Week 38 to Week 43). Other sections touch on everything from leadership succession to leadership goals. In fact, Leadership Network supplied so many transcripts and other materials to the author that his opening acknowledgment reads: “I first want to thank Bob Buford….”
The book has received positive reviews, such as in the The Wall Street Journal. Heady but consistently insightful, it offers a top-flight one-book overview of the core coaching that Drucker gave to many evangelical leaders.
Implementing Drucker’s secular business practices in the church has inevitably led to destruction because the true church is “built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone” (Ephesians 2:20). Drucker’s business practices have acted like steroids being injected into the body causing unnatural monster growth from which the consequences will be severe and fatal. These evangelical megachurches are not really churches at all because they are not built upon the foundation of Jesus Christ.