Education Quote by Clayton Christensen

Christensen is smuggling a quiet rebuke into a sentence that sounds, at first pass, like a quaint logistical detail. “We don’t hire ministers or priests” is framed as an administrative choice, but it’s really an argument against outsourcing virtue. The point isn’t anti-clerical; it’s anti-consumer. If you can pay professionals to absorb the messy work of moral formation - showing up, listening, grieving, correcting, feeding - then faith becomes another service industry: you buy the feelings, the rituals, the reassurance, and go home unchanged.

The subtext is aimed at affluent, highly organized communities (and, yes, corporate leaders) who are good at scaling systems and delegating everything else. Christensen, the business thinker famous for “disruption,” flips that instinct. Here, the “inefficiency” is the feature. A congregation without paid clergy doesn’t just save money; it creates unavoidable friction. People are forced into one another’s lives, which is precisely where empathy stops being a slogan and becomes muscle memory.

His final clause - “the core of Christian living as Christ taught it” - is a rhetorical stake in the ground. It narrows Christianity away from doctrine-as-performance and toward discipleship-as-practice, echoing the gospels’ insistence on acts of care over displays of piety. Coming from a businessman, the context matters: it reads like a critique of the managerial mindset invading religion, and a reminder that communities don’t become humane by hiring experts. They become humane when ordinary people accept that they are, unavoidably, the ones responsible.