A very good friend of mine is both a management consultant and a regular communicant at his church. It is easy to knock consultancy, but there’s also a great deal we can learn from it. Here’s a summary: https://twitter.com/giles_fraser/status/1331305258677579777

1) Management consultants know how to distinguish what is a core functions of an organisation from peripheral activities.

2) Consultants, if they do their job well, take history seriously. Past performance and the reasons for it matter to the functioning of a business and matter in the church too.

3) Consultants take the demands of the public seriously: if you don’t know your market, you won’t be able to succeed as a business. As @WalkerMarcus and others have pointed out, the church has rarely done in-depth polling and analysis about what the public want from the church...

...and why they go/don’t go, and who the sort of person who could be persuaded to go is.

4) Consultants take effective use of resources seriously. Once you have established what your product is or should be, what are the means you need to deliver it? Too often the church has done reorganisation in a piecemeal way in response to change....

.... and this is bad for both morale and for actually doing the most effective ministry we can.

So there’s 4 reasons to listen to the management consultants rather than just recoil from the language. Sure there are many examples of terrible results from consultancy or ‘change for change’s sake’. But if we’re serious about mission we should use every tool available.

(And if you’re a management consultant reading this, you’re very welcome to tell me what I’ve got wrong about your job!)