“Unfortunately, the metaphor that dominates most of American Christianity doesn’t help us much; we usually envision the church as a corporation. The pastor is the CEO, there are committees and boards. Evangelism is the manufacturing process by which we make our product, and sales can be charted, compared, and forecast. Of course, this manufacturing process goes on in a growth economy so that any corporation-church whose annual sales figures aren’t up from last year’s is in trouble. Americans are quite single-minded in their captivity to the corporation metaphor. And it isn’t even biblical. —Hal Miller”