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I call this sub-spiritual, mechanical approach to ministry “Church, Inc.” It is shorthand for ministry devoid of mystery, for pastors who assume that the exercise of their calling is a matter of skill more than the gravity of their soul.
Andrea Paulson liked this
All of the inexorable doctrines of Christianity are immeasurable, sometimes paradoxical, mysteries.
My hope is that as you rediscover the immeasurability of ministry, you will marvel anew at the work to which you’ve been called—and at the One who has called you to it.
Their desire to serve God and people was the engine that drove them to make enormous sacrifices.
What appears to be love or devotion externally may actually be fueled by profound insecurity or even, in rare cases, pathological mental illness.
WOAH....
They remind us that the call to leadership is a result of God’s grace; it doesn’t come from our desire for acclaim.
We should remember, however, that while being a church leader in the first century may have offered a person more honor within the Christian community, it also often carried the likelihood of greater persecution by those outside of it. In other words, leadership carried a cost.
The challenge, therefore, is to recognize the volatile and combustible nature of ambition. When paired with godliness and humility, and guided by a love for others, it can ignite life-giving change in the world.
Ambition, when combined with the accelerants of ego and insecurity, can become a source of great destruction.
My point is simple: effectiveness isn’t everything.
Everywhere we go, we are bombarded with the message that our significance is proportional to how much we change the world.
It seems that Millennials, more than any previous generation, have been shaped by a culture that equates effectiveness with significance.
As I read these things, I think of myself 15 years ago-a senior in high school. Guess what words had a dramatic impact on me? "Change the world."
It didn’t occur to any of you to say that in the midst of your sin God loves you.”
We have replaced the love of the living God with sacrifices to the Idol of Effectiveness. When we bow to this idol, it steals our joy and replaces it with an unbearable burden. We begin to see everything—our value, our identity, even the absence or presence of sin in our lives—through the lens of effectiveness. But the most tragic lie the Idol of Effectiveness tells us is that a life spent in service for God is the same as a life with God.
He is so on point! Wow! That's incredibly powerful to read.
Jesus says many will come to Him on that day completely convinced that they belong to Him because of their effectiveness.
The Idol of Effectiveness has power because it causes us to look at the wrong fruit. We become enamored by relevance, power, impact, and how much we have changed the world. While all of those things are measures of effectiveness, none of them are a measure of faithfulness.
Because God does not judge our effectiveness. He judges our
faithfulness.
But in fact God may be working in spite of us, not because of us. And here’s the real truth we don’t like to admit—every time God works, it is in spite of us. He does not need us to accomplish His work. If He did, He wouldn’t be a God worthy of our worship. There is an important truth that ministers need to hear as much as, if not more than, everyone else: God does not need you. He wants you. He did not send His Son to recruit you to change the world. He sent His Son to reconcile you to Himself. Your value to God is not in your effectiveness, but in your presence.
Woah! What a blast to my soul! But I need this!
The fruit of a life lived in communion with Jesus Christ is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, goodness, faithfulness, and self-control. If we are to slay the Idol of Effectiveness then we must recapture the glorious truth that before we are called to something or somewhere, our highest calling is to Someone.
As ministers of the gospel of Christ, we must stand boldly against the popular belief that everything and everyone exists to be useful. We must remember that in His grace God has created some things not to be used, but simply to behold.
True worship can never be wasteful because it seeks no return on investment. True worship is never a transaction. It is always a gift—an extravagant, “wasteful” gift.
Artists who cultivate beauty in the world remind us that the most precious things are often the least useful. Artists provoke us to see the world differently—not simply as a bundle of resources to be used, but as a gift to be received.
Why do they see Christ as giving them life but view the church as taking it from them?
For younger Americans, big doesn’t mean legitimate; big means corrupt.
That’s a glimpse of what’s happening in our culture. We are seeing the emergence of an anti-institutional, highly entrepreneurial generation.
In light of this, Paul says that Jesus has given people to the church as gifts: “And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers …” (Eph. 4:11).
Instead, it referred to any act of service that brought glory to God.
The question Paul is addressing here is, How does Jesus extend His rule over all things? The answer: By giving the church leaders, filled with His power, to equip His people to serve Him and manifest His rule everywhere.
Leaders within the church are called to equip us to serve Jesus everywhere, every day, and in every aspect of our lives.
Rather than empowering people to manifest God’s reign in the world, vampire churches seek to use people to advance the goals of the institutional church. Success, therefore, is reached when a person is plugged into the apparatus of the church institution rather than released to serve God’s people and their neighbors out in the world, through their vocations, and in communion with Christ. This drive to use people rather than empower them is what drains the life out of them.
What if the problem isn’t that young people aren’t committed to the church, but that the church isn’t committed to young people? I challenged him with a different approach: rather than trying to get young people to engage your institution’s programs and goals, what if you shifted the institution to equip young people to better accomplish what God is calling them to do in the world?
The greatest resource God has given this planet are His redeemed and Spirit-filled people.
As leaders, if we are to avoid building vampire churches, we must remember these three things: 1. The church is the community of God’s redeemed and empowered people. 2. The church institution exists to equip God’s people. God’s people do not exist to equip the institution. 3. Ministry is not limited to what we do within the church institution, but should include what we do to manifest the reign of Christ in the world.
The answer is for us, the church, the people of Christ, to align ourselves more closely to Christ and His Word, to remember our callings to one another and to this world, and to manifest the reign of Christ, who has been raised up and is seated at the right hand of the Father and who, even now, is making all things new. We do not lose hope, because He is still the head of His church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.
We need godly shepherds to lead, feed, and protect us from the world and from ourselves. We are irrefutably sinful (and often stupid) creatures, willing to throw ourselves off a cliff of self-destruction.
Sometimes the most difficult part about pastoral ministry is knowing what is not our responsibility.
But when feeding and tending becomes controlling, we’ve overstepped our role as a shepherd.
First, there is the drama of the practical.
Those men and women who learn to master the drama of the practical are often the most revered and celebrated. They know how to get things done,
the drama of the theoretical.
This drama of the theoretical is where our assumptions and beliefs exert invisible influence.
They include what we really believe about the church, mission, culture, and theology.
the drama of the eternal.
We are spiritual leaders called to shepherd the souls of women, men, and children.
Of course, long before we can hope to see into the “silences of the souls of men,” we must learn to discern the secret things that move within our own souls.
Do our actions, even the busy ones, flow from a soul at peace in the presence of the Lord, or are we accomplishing objectives from an idolatrous desire to serve our ego?
Could practical ministry success and painful failure germinate from the same seed?
The drama of the eternal, His inner communion with the Father, defined and determined the outward drama of His life.
Like the minefield of poop that is our church parking lot, our communities are littered with the debris left by destructive spiritual forces: divorce, addiction, injustice, racism, materialism, dishonesty, abuse.
