“Butts, Budgets, and Behaviors”

This chapter examines how pastors match their own evaluation of themselves as “successful entrepreneurs” against external evaluations of them as “failures” based on conventional measures of success: large congregations, large bank accounts, and large sanctuaries. This chapter shows that an essential component of founding pastors’ beliefs that their churches are successful, even if they only have 30 members or are mortgaging their home to pay the church’s bills, is the ambiguous and difficult-to-quantify measure of “changed lives.” They argued the evidence of their success was the way parishioners’ souls have been revived, their lives have been rebuilt, and the communities around them have been revitalized. Sociologist Carl Bankston sees “religious environments as economies in which religious groups are firms competing for customers who make rational choices among available products.” With this in mind, this chapter also examines how pastors think about competition and their position in a competitive religious economy.