You know that feeling when you try to tell a funny story and no one gets it? I’ve been reflecting on an incident like that from last summer. We’d just gotten a new priest a church, and being the choir director, I emailed him my Choir Operating Plan, which was based on a business plan template I got at a Young Agrarians conference. I assumed that a priest wouldn’t know anything about business management, so I was pleasantly surprised when he wrote back with detailed suggestions for how to improve the plan that sounded as if he’d been to the same management workshops as me and then some. Things like “SMART” goals, stuff like that.

I thought it was hilarious, the juxtaposition of my assumptions against the reality that I actually stood to learn something about business management from this new priest of ours. I thought it was so hilarious, that I told the story to a few people later that day. From my hearers’ reserved responses, they clearly didn’t think it was either wonderful or hilarious. They thought I was saying that my new priest wanted to run the church like a business.

That’s not what I was saying, and I couldn’t understand how I could have been so badly misunderstood, so I spent some time reflecting on this incident and what it might mean. Was I just not a very good storyteller? Possibly. Was it that non-church people sometimes (and often understandably) have negative impressions about priests and other symbols of Christianity, and so wouldn’t find any church story very funny? Possibly.

I wonder if the truth has more to do with what I was and wasn’t meaning when I said it was nice to have a priest who knows something about business management. On the most literal level, I have to admit I’ve gotten sloppy. I tend to use the term “business management” as a catch-all phrase for being smart about how you use your time and resources to reach your goals, even if there’s no money involved. My sloppy use of the term “business management” could lead to the second, and possibly more important misunderstanding.

I suspect that the word “business” tends to evoke a sense of “it’s just business, not personal.” In other words, “business” equally putting money before people, before environment, before everything. And maybe even not just putting money in front of everything, but more generally speaking putting things like efficiency and hard-and-fast numerical results in front of human needs. I can respect why anyone would recoil from the idea of using “business management” at church, if that’s your definition of business.

The thing is, I’ve come to forget that “business” can have such negative connotations. Some of this flows out of attitudes I’ve seen in Yoshiko, the farm owner, while in other respects my positive connotations around “business” have to do with my own role as farm business partner, where being smart about money is a way to safeguard the opportunity we have to care for this land and to maintain the community that’s grown up around the farm.

I admit I didn’t start trying to learn much about business management until a conversation I had one day with, yes, another priest. My previous priest used to live near the farmers market, so I’d go and talk with him sometimes after I’d finished with packing up the vegetable stand. On a number of occasions, I asked his advice about the ongoing frustration and anger I felt around certain situations at the farm. I expected that being a priest, he’d have something really spiritual to say about this, like something about patience and self-sacrifice maybe. Instead, to my surprise, he simply said, “The problem is that you need to learn more about business management.”

As we talked more, the priest told me stories of a man he knows who owns an auto mechanic shop.  Even in his sixties, this small business owner has business management audiobooks playing in his truck so that when he’s on the road, he can get tips on how to run his business more wisely. The payoff? When a long-term employee developed mental problems and wouldn’t be hireable anywhere else, he was able to keep him on payroll and engaged in meaningful work, even in a situation where many business would have simply fired the same person. Because he paid attention to business management, he could offer this generosity while still making sure that the business would still be there to provide for his family and for his other employees’ families in years to come.

Is this vision of “business” as a way to support an extended family of employees through the long-term overly idealistic? I’m not sure it is. The more I read about “business management” and leadership, the more I hear professional, secular voices saying that in the long run, being smart about business means being smart about people, and being smart about people means being a good human being: take care of the people around you, foster trust, foster cooperation.

I will end with a link. “If you don’t understand people, you don’t understand business” and other talks by Simon Sinek are manifestos for the vision of “business management” I’ve been talking about here. I don’t see how we can loose if we do this at work, at home, at church, anywhere.