Book Report Stewardship by Peter Block

Reading Report


LDR 701/SFM 701 The Transformational Leader
Date of course:
January 10-21, 2005
Student
Ross Rohde
Book
Block, Peter. Stewardship. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, San Francisco, CA, 1996 Read 264 of 264 pages

I. What is the main idea or thesis of the author?

This is a book about leadership. Specifically it is about leadership in a business context, but by extension some principals can be related to Christian leadership. This is about a paradigm shift in our thinking and governance of business from a compliance, status based system of management to a democratic system of stewardship. Stewardship is about responsibility, it is about governing the resources of others under our control for the owners benefit. Stewardship is about service and not doing what is necessarily in our own interest. This is in direct contrast with the typical paradigm of the use of power in business which is leadership. Stewardship moves power and choice down and to the edge of the organizational chain where actual work is done. Leadership centralizes and pushes power up the hierarchical structure.

II. What is my interpretation of the author’s thesis?

The author’s concept of stewardship is much closer to the biblical paradigm of leadership laid out by Jesus in Matt. 20:25-26, and Luke 22:25 where service is our paradigm and not power over, or as Jesus calls it “lording over” others. Stewardship as the author sees it is serving the business and serving those who are “under us” in the hierarchy to make them successful. To apply this to the Church it would mean serving the Kingdom as under God’s authority and serving those whom we lead. The application breaks down though because a business setting is a human organization using human power to accomplish human goals. The Church is a supernatural organism, using divine power to accomplish divine goals. Because business is human it must use the human form of organization, which is the hierarchical power structure. As much as Block wants to step away from this, he can not completely do it. However, the Church can function as a non-hierarchical organism, and in fact was originally designed to do just that. The Church rarely actually functions as it was designed to, having imported the human way of doing business based on human effort; but that is another issue.

Having said this Block’s view of leadership as stewardship takes a huge step forward in coming back to the biblical view of leadership that the Church seems to have mostly lost over the last twenty centuries. We can not however, just apply these principals into the Church because, as good as they are, they are still not designed to function as God’s divine power working through humans. This is what we need to get away from in the Church.

III. What would a serious application of this book look like?

A serious application of this within a business setting is clearly laid out in Block’s section II, “The Redistribution of Power, Purpose and Wealth”. However I don’t believe that we can fully apply these principals to a church setting. There are however some principals we can apply. The first is the basic premise of the book, leadership isn’t about power for oneself, it is for the good of others. This is very clearly biblical in its outlook. The redistribution of power in many churches and Christian organizations is necessary. They are top down organizations, with human leaders called pastors or presidents or directors. It would be impossible looking at their organizational structure to distinguish them from a secular business. And, they run like a secular business. People at the top make decisions; people at the “bottom” carry out orders. This is exactly what Jesus told us not to do. Even if we were to apply Block’s stewardship principals, we would at least be closer to what the Bible and Jesus himself describes as leadership. A flatter hierarchical structure is at least better than a steep one.

Churches and Christian organizations are not about money, and profits. There is not really any wealth to share. The rewards come from Jesus and not from the church or the organization, or at least they should. So these aspects of Block’s principals do not directly apply.
This book does highlight though just how far many churches and Christian organizations have strayed from where they should be. As Block describes business he is unfortunately describing many churches and organizations. If nothing else, this should serve as a wake up call.