I think every pastor and church leader should read Uncharitable by Dan Pollatta.

1. Dan will make you mad. He challenges conventional thinking. It’s one of those books that I love to read because it stretched my thinking. One page excited me. The next page made me want to throw the book away.

2. Dan provides a comprehensive historical context that explains why and how we think about nonprofits, their work, and how we should manage them. It’s important for us to understand the source of our assumptions to understand how perpetuating them inhibits our ability to fulfill our potential to make a measurable difference and create lasting change.

3. Dan argues that nonprofit leaders should value impact and results, not efficient management. There is a lot of talk about efficiency. In other words, we praise leaders who do as much as possible with as little as possible. Instead, Dan says we should place the emphasis on impact and results. For profit companies aren’t rewarded because they produce cheaper products; they are rewarded for creating and marketing products that achieve and exceed sales goals. This principle is even more important when we put it into the nonprofit context because we are tasked with solving social problems, economic inequities, and facilitating spiritual formation.

Dan certainly doesn’t speak directly to churches. He doesn’t use vocabulary that is familiar to most church leaders. Nevertheless, the application is very clear to me. The work we do as churches is far too important to perpetuate the status quo at the expense of providing and executing a plan for change that achieves measurable results.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsSibGt4wzc]