I spent a number of years in higher education, first as a graduate student who was slow to finish, and then, for a little while, as a professor. I wasn’t terribly good at being a professor, so over a decade ago, I jumped ship for the corporate world, where I’ve held various number crunching jobs ever since. One thing that’s struck me in my time in the corporate world is how many ways my experience at work is similar to my experience at church.
One quick aside: When people talk about the Church as being a corporation, they most often mean it seems like a money-making enterprise, like that it buys and sells stocks and real estate and gets into legal arguments over things like trademarks. In this post, when I’m comparing the Church to a corporation, I’m instead thinking of my day-to-day church experience.
Here are some ways my church experience is like my experience being an employee of a large corporation:
- New programs replace old programs, and the leaders presenting the new programs bear their testimony of how inspired the programs are. Of course, in the corporate world, people don’t say they’re “bearing testimony,” but when I think, for example, how I’ve heard leaders gushing over how AI is going to change our whole workplace and make everything better, it sounds quite a bit like a testimony.
- New programs are sometimes rolled out incompletely, and collide with old programs that might have people doing completely different things. An example of this I remember encountering as a missionary was that when I was in the MTC, the teachers told us we shouldn’t be pretending to be someone else when we role-played teaching, because that was lying and would offend the Spirit. Then when I got to my mission, when I role-played as myself, my zone leader looked at me like I had two heads.
- Reports are always shaded to highlight the good news and downplay the bad. In the LDS context, you can see this in the incredible shrinking statistical report, which has been trimmed down dramatically over the years when a bunch of numbers didn’t look positive enough, and in Russell M. Nelson’s spree of temple announcements, which seemed at least partially designed to show evidence of Church growth, even as membership growth slowed. In my corporate jobs, I’ve seen this both in internal reports, where people shy away from delivering outright bad news, and external, where publicly traded companies’ earnings calls for investors inevitably emphasize things that are going well, regardless of any other things that might be going badly.
- Programs are sometimes undertaken with no clear endgame in mind. The obvious Church example is, again, the temple-announcing spree, which was clearly unsustainable, but President Nelson might have figured wasn’t going to be his problem for long. But there was also the if-you-build-it-they-will-come church building spree that got the Church in financial difficulty in the 1950s and 1960s before they brought in N. Eldon Tanner to right the ship. Along similar lines, but at a smaller scale as I’ve only ever been a low-level corporate employee, I’ve seen programs and recurring reports set up with no clear maintenance plan or thought to the circumstances under which they could be discontinued.
- Lower-level leaders rarely if ever openly disagree with higher-level leaders. In my corporate jobs, I’ve found quite a few leaders who would privately admit to disagreeing with some policy or other, sometimes strongly. But they hardly ever raise these issues to the higher-ups. Similarly, I’ve had bishops admit that they don’t like such-and-such policy of the Church’s, but they’re of course not going to raise it with anyone higher up. In both organization types, lower-level leaders can become higher-level ones if they follow the organization line closely enough.
- Taking off from the previous point, some people (in the Church, some men) end up on a track for management advancement, while most remain individual contributors. With more time on the management track, higher-up leaders in both types of organizations lose track of (if they ever even knew) the concerns of the rank and file. (And thinking along similar lines, I really liked Quentin’s comment on a W&T post a couple of years ago where he relates management and individual contributor tracks to eternal progression.)
- Lower-level leaders are variable in quality. This is probably inevitable in any large organization not made up of robots. In the Church, it’s bishop roulette (or stake or branch president roulette). I’ve had some quite good bishops, and at worst, not very bad bishops. I’ve been lucky. At work, I’ve been less lucky. I’ve had some truly outstanding managers, but others who were awful and cruel. Like in the Church, I really had no effective feedback mechanism in these situations.
- Top leaders talk a good game about valuing members/employees, but they often manifest suspicion or contempt of us. On the Church side, I’m thinking for example of Dallin H. Oaks worrying in his 2007 talk “Good, Better, Best” that Church leaders might “reduce the time required by Church meetings and activities” and then people might fritter the saved time away rather than using it how GAs want us to. The metamessage is clear: The Church owns our time, and the GAs will not be happy if they hear we’ve been using it frivolously. On the corporate side, I’ve heard lots of messages about how employees are the company’s most valuable asset, but this doesn’t ever seem to translate into better compensation or better working conditions or more focus on work/life balance. On the bright side in the corporate world, the top leaders actually have surveyed all employees, but this seems pretty much for show, as co-workers I’ve talked to have worried that they’ll be fired for actually airing complaints, and the surveys don’t ever result in material changes. The Church, of course, makes no pretense about caring what members think, and in fact actively discourages us from contacting top leaders with our concerns.
- New leaders shuffle things around to put their mark on the organization. We’ve seen this recently in the Church with Dallin H. Oaks doing things like putting an end to Russell M. Nelson’s temple-announcing spree, lowering the mission age for women, and going back to a three-period Sunday service (although still in two hours, and not until September). Similarly, in my corporate jobs, I’ve seen new leaders tinker with rules and programs, often with no apparent reason other than to appear to be doing something.
- Reorganizations are thrust on the rank-and-file with no warning or input. This has been a pretty regular feature of my corporate jobs, where groups doing parallel work are sometimes aggregated and other time disaggregated, and then maybe aggregated again in a slightly different way. In the Church, this shows up in people being called to and released from prominent callings, and in ward boundary realignments.
- Individual members/employees are sometimes shuffled around. In my jobs, I’ve sometimes been a “loaned resource” and temporarily assigned to another team to help with a particular project. In the Church, although it’s rare at least in my experience, I’ve seen a bishop called from outside a ward’s boundaries, and an entire ward moved between stakes so a member of it could be stake president.
- The organization cares more about getting new people (members, employees/customers) than retaining existing ones. In the corporate world, I’ve heard several stories of people who left a company and then returned months or years later with a substantial raise, which of course wasn’t going to be offered to them if they had stayed. And the Church is of course laser focused on baptism numbers, but seems overall much more blasé about member retention.
- There’s no changing the organization, really. If you don’t like it, your choices are to stay and put up with it or leave.
I’d love to hear if you’ve had similar experiences, or different ones! I’d especially be interested to hear if you’ve had experience in another church. For example from what my sister Lynnette has told me about her experience in the Episcopal Church, it sounds a lot more like academia, with committees for everything, from choosing music to choosing a new pastor. Perhaps it’s not surprising that the more top-down LDS Church ended up more like a large corporation.