equip the Church

The CFO and COO are essential. They just can’t be in charge.

There’s a pattern that more often than not destroys innovation — not just in business, but in ministry. When Boeing merged with McDonnell Douglas, they stopped dreaming about the future of flight and started engineering financial statements. When IBM shifted from innovation to financial optimization, they conceded the future to startups.

Christian publishers are in danger of doing the same thing to themselves.

Let me be clear from the start: this is not an argument against financial discipline or operational excellence. Every healthy publishing ministry needs people who manage budgets carefully, control production costs, and build reliable systems. The CFO and COO roles are not the problem. The problem is when those roles set the vision rather than serve it.

The CFO and COO are essential. They should not be in charge.

TWO KINDS OF THINKING

This difference is the tension between deterministic and probabilistic thinking. The deterministic mind sees the world as a predictable equation: invest X, produce Y, profit Z. It excels at protecting what already works. The probabilistic mind understands that breakthrough often comes from making multiple bets, accepting some failure as the cost of discovery, and believing that one unexpected win can pay for many smaller losses.

Both ways of thinking are necessary. A publishing ministry with no deterministic thinking burns through resources and moves from crisis to crisis. But a publishing ministry governed entirely by deterministic thinking stops taking the risks that the Great Commission requires.

The question isn’t which mindset to choose. It’s which one sets the direction.

THE PRODUCTION LINE PROBLEM

Walk into many Christian publishing houses and you’ll find the production workflow perfectly optimized:

Manuscript → Edit → Translate → Print → Warehouse → Hope

The CFO can tell you exactly what each step costs. The COO has built reliable systems around each stage. That discipline is genuinely valuable — without it, nothing gets published at all.

But notice what’s missing from that workflow: the reader. The question of whether the right content is reaching the right people in ways they can actually receive it often gets crowded out by the demands of running the machine efficiently.

Operational excellence is a tool. When it becomes the goal, we’ve lost the plot. We start measuring success by units produced rather than lives transformed, and optimizing for a certain 10% cost reduction rather than an uncertain 10x increase in reach.

THE COMPETITION YOU’RE NOT SEEING

Here’s something that often gets lost in production planning: your theology book isn’t competing primarily against other theology books. It’s competing against Netflix, Instagram, and a nap. We talk about this a lot because we always forget.

The person you’re trying to reach isn’t sitting at home thinking, “I really need to read more Christian content today.” They’re exhausted, distracted, and being pulled in seventeen directions at once. Good operational systems don’t solve that problem. Creative, courageous distribution strategy does.

The CFO can ensure the book was printed at the right cost. The COO can ensure it arrived in the warehouse on time. Neither can tell you how to earn someone’s attention in a world engineered to steal it. That requires a different kind of leadership — someone willing to experiment, to try things that might not work, and to measure success by impact rather than efficiency.

THE WAREHOUSE OF BURIED TREASURE

One of the places this tension shows up most clearly is in how publishers treat their backlist.

The COO mind tends to write off older titles. They complicate the inventory system, they don’t fit this year’s strategic plan, they’re not new. The CFO mind may have already written down their value on the balance sheet.

But here’s what both miss: spiritual truths don’t expire. The human heart in 2025 struggles with the same fundamental questions it struggled with in 1925. How do I find meaning? How do I trust God when everything is falling apart? Most of your catalog could be just as relevant in 2035 as it is today.

A missionary mindset looks at the backlist and sees underdistributed treasure. What if we spent six months not creating anything new, and instead focused entirely on getting what we already have to the people who need it?

That question makes the COO nervous. It should make the rest of us curious.

Your next breakthrough might already be sitting in your warehouse.

FAITHFUL STEWARDSHIP — RIGHTLY UNDERSTOOD

Christian publishers often invoke stewardship to justify caution. We say we’re being wise when we avoid distribution experiments, keep our marketing conservative, and stick to what’s worked before. And stewardship does require care with resources — the CFO is right about that.

But Jesus’s parable of the talents complicates this picture. The servant who buried his talent wasn’t reckless — he was careful. He returned exactly what he’d been given. And he was called wicked and lazy.

True stewardship isn’t just protecting the asset. It’s deploying it faithfully toward the purpose for which it was given. If you have content that could help someone navigate grief, strengthen their marriage, or deepen their faith — and it’s sitting in a warehouse because no one has built a distribution strategy around it — that’s not stewardship. That’s a buried talent with a budget report attached.

The CFO and COO have essential roles in ensuring resources aren’t wasted. But the missionary leader has to keep asking the harder question: wasted toward what end?

FROM FISHERMEN TO FINANCE AND BACK

Jesus’s disciples were fishermen who probably understood probabilistic thinking intuitively. You cast nets in multiple places. You try different times and different depths. You accept empty nets as part of the process, because you know one good catch can feed a multitude. You don’t stop fishing because the last cast didn’t pay off.

Somewhere along the way, Christian publishing adopted a different model, one which is closer to manufacturing than fishing. Consistent inputs, predictable outputs, minimized variance.

But the gospel itself didn’t spread through optimized production. It spread through people willing to go to places they hadn’t been, try things that hadn’t been tried, and trust that faithfulness in distribution would be honored even when results were unpredictable.

Christian publishing needs to remember how to fish. Systems keep the lights on. Vision decides what we’re illuminating.

THE VISIONARY CEO: WHO MUST LEAD

So if the CFO and COO shouldn’t set the direction, who should? The answer is the visionary CEO — and in a publishing ministry, that role carries a weight that goes beyond the typical business definition.

Patrick Lencioni, in his book, The Advantage, is unambiguous on this point: the top leader must be the one who drives the organization’s health, and that begins with answering one foundational question — why do we exist? Not as a slogan on a wall, but as a living conviction that shapes every editorial decision, every distribution bet, every dollar spent. When that question goes unanswered, the CFO and COO don’t leave a vacuum. They fill it — with what they know: numbers and systems.

The visionary CEO in a publishing ministry is the person who sees what the content could do in the world and refuses to stop talking about it. They are the one who walks into a budget meeting and says, “I know the margins are tight, but there are pastors in francophone Africa who have never had access to a Study Bible in their language — and we have 20 pallets of them sitting in our warehouse” They keep the mission from becoming abstract by making it concrete and personal.

Lencioni also insists that the top leader must go first. They must model the vulnerability, the risk-taking, and the clarity of purpose that they want to see in the rest of the team. A visionary CEO who preaches probabilistic thinking but defers every bold decision to the CFO sends a message louder than any memo. The team watches what leaders do, not what they say.

In Christian publishing, this visionary role has a prophetic dimension that secular management theory can only partially capture. The visionary isn’t just setting strategy, they are keeping the ministry’s eyes fixed on the people it exists to serve. They are the ones who will stand before God accountable not for whether the books were beautiful, but for whether the truth reached the people who needed it.

The visionary’s job is to keep asking: who are we for, and are we actually reaching them?

THE RIGHT ORDER OF THINGS

The healthiest publishing ministries hold these roles in proper order. The CFO ensures the organization can survive long enough to fulfill its mission. The COO ensures it runs well enough to do so consistently. But neither sets the vision. Neither determines which risks are worth taking. Neither decides what the mission actually demands.

That belongs to the visionary CEO, he is the leader who thinks like a missionary, who is willing to try ten distribution strategies knowing that seven will fail, celebrate the three that work, and keep going. Who looks at the backlist and sees opportunity. Who measures success not by what was produced but by whose life was changed.

The CFO asks, “Can we afford this?”

The COO asks, “Can we execute this reliably?”

The visionary CEO asks, “Who are we leaving behind if we don’t?”

All three questions matter. Only one should lead.