Is your church ISO9000?

I found myself in one of those meetings again.
Oh this wasn't a church meeting, it was several years ago at the company I used to work for.
They were starting a quality program, following in the footsteps of the Ford Motor company's "quality is job one" theme. In a nutshell it basically talked about doing your job better, documenting everything, and whammo, your doing better work.
Everybody is happy right?
We starting having what seemed like dozens of meetings monthly. We talked about how to do our job's better and how we could make the process smoother.
Sounds really good doesn't it.
One problem.
We didn't talk about our customers.
What was their needs, how could we serve them better.
In our meetings we focused on ourselves, and I began to wonder, was even all the time we were taking in these meetings, causing us to ignore our customers even more?
Which brings me to today's church landscape.
Somewhere the church adapted business ideas to church growth and development. It was reasoned that if it worked for Jack at GE, it will work for the church.
So we all sat down and ground out purpose statements, I guess for some reason we forgot why our church exists.
I can just see Paul talking to the elders at Cornith, "look your never going to get anywhere until you have a bunch of meetings and come up with a purpose statement".
I know I sound cynical, and I know the church needs reminded from time to time what it's supposed to be doing.
But I really dislike the purpose statement.
It would be fine if we really believed and practiced what we spent so much time writing. The truth is we write a beautiful statement, but then we just keep doing things the way we always did. The other thing is this, have we become so out of whack that we need to be constantly reminded what we are here for? If that's the case we have some serious problems anyway.
I guess I hate working on something, just for the sake of working on something. If we are going to do things better, then let's do it, all the way. If your going to take up my time and just talk about doing things better, then I can find better uses for my time.
In all of this I'm afraid we are missing the point of ministry, and gauging success on numbers alone. Numbers are nice, but moving people closer in their relationship with Jesus is even better. I find that when we do that, numbers don't become a problem.
I heard today that Ford is laying off. It's really sad that many people are losing their jobs.
Did Ford become more concerned with their profits than their customers? If Ford's culture was truly the best quality going, would they be in this mess?
Tough questions.
Maybe a better one is, which model is the church going to follow?
Ford or Jesus Christ?
Hmmmmm.