Immeasurable: Reflections on the Soul of Ministry in the Age of Church, Inc.
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There is hope. 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.
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“When you look at how off track we are, do you ever just throw up your hands in despair?” He smiled at me and said, “Never.” “How can you not?” I asked. “You just spent two hours explaining everything that’s wrong with the church.” “Because,” he said, “I know Christ is the head of His church and He knows what He’s doing.”
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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.
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Why did these sheep perish? It turns out the shepherds responsible for protecting the flock had left the sheep on the mountain and had gone to eat breakfast when the fleeces started to fly.
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The fact that Scripture often compares God’s people to sheep ought to humble us. 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. This truth about God’s sheep, however, can tempt shepherds to overstep their role. Sometimes the most difficult part about pastoral ministry is knowing what is not our responsibility.
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guidance they can do nothing. So beyond feeding and tending, we assume it is also our responsibility to call, to tell Christ’s sheep what they are to do. We believe this because it is partially true. Feeding and tending includes teaching. We are to instruct God’s flock from Scripture and teach them to obey all He has commanded. The general commands from the Bible that apply to all disciples are sometimes known as our corporate or common calling.
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We spend much of our energy calling people to our mission—to advance our church, to be evangelists or, even better, missionaries—and we do this with the best of intentions. We want to see God’s work accomplished. What we forget is that Christ has called us to be shepherds who feed and tend, not masters who call.
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Even in Matthew 9, when Jesus says, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few,” He does not tell His disciples to find, call, and send out more laborers. He instructs them to “pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers.” Jesus does not outsource to us God’s responsibility to call.
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We may think it’s our job to call as many people into ministry, missions, or church work as possible, but a disciple’s specific calling always comes from Christ. Our task is to lead disciples into deeper communion with Him. Christ’s sheep need a shepherd. They already have a Lord.
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In what ways have the values of businesses and corporations become integrated into your ministry? Which of these values are genuinely helpful, and which may be drawing you from the ways of Christ?
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they often find themselves writing about the world rather than running it.
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We are not merely managers of religious institutions with practical duties. Neither are we merely thought-leaders living on the rarified air of theory and vision. We are spiritual leaders called to shepherd the souls of women, men, and children.
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What does attracting a crowd to hear me speak do to satisfy my insecure identity?
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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?
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If we take our gaze off the celebrity pastors (practical dramatists) and the ministry pundits (theoretical dramatists) and fix our eyes once again on Jesus, we’ll discover a spiritual leader with the wisdom to focus on the only drama that really matters. Jesus lived and served from a soul at one with the Father and an identity secure in His love.
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Read the spiritual classic by Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God. Consider what it would look like in your life to pray without ceasing and live with a constant awareness of the Lord’s presence.
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our communities are littered with the debris left by destructive spiritual forces: divorce, addiction, injustice, racism, materialism, dishonesty, abuse. If your community is soiled by any of these (and how could it not be?), you are engaged in a spiritual battle with unseen forces. Remember, the New Testament doesn’t just present spiritual warfare as a cinematic battle between angels and demons. Scripture speaks about the systems of “the world” as corrupt and destructive. In other words, spiritual battle isn’t just with demons, but with dehumanizing systems, too. For Paul they are one and the ...more
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Everything begins with seeing the truth about our enemy, acknowledging the truth about ourselves, and humbly admitting the truth that we need God’s
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when we acknowledge that the excrement in our church is no less vile than in the surrounding community, it should humble us to see that we need a power beyond ourselves to overcome it. We need grace. We need to access this grace through prayer. And when that truth is embraced, our enemy will tremble.
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What makes your church or ministry different from a non-Christian nonprofit organization? Would an outside observer recognize practices or behaviors that would identity your work as uniquely Christian?
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The glamour of the mega-ministry and its ability to offer greater choices appears to be fading, at least in some regions. But is this shift anything more than a reflection of social trends?
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research shows that Millennials are suspicious of large institutions, unlike Baby Boomers, who usually equate largeness with legitimacy. Still, I wonder if we’re also witnessing a theological shift that is eroding the philosophical foundations of very large ministries (VLMs) while providing validation for leaner ones.
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Rather than affirming the work of Christians serving as counselors, mechanics, or fitness trainers out in the community, these activities only find validation when they are incorporated into ministries. Over time this desire to sanctify our work results in VLMs housing restaurants, auto repair shops, fitness centers, retail stores, clinics, and a plethora of programs requiring a steady influx of volunteers to manage.
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Luther, Calvin, and their spiritual descendants affirmed a theology of vocation that said all of life, and all work, were sacred. Accounting mattered and brought glory to God even when done outside the church. This allowed the institutional church to shrink its footprint and simplify its ministry to preaching the Scriptures and administering the sacraments. It also empowered the laity to carry Christ’s presence into the various channels of the culture through their vocations, rather than forcing the entire culture under the domain of the institutional church.
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A new generation of church leaders and laity are restoring a vision for cultural participation and a renewed theology of vocation. They’re coming to see the value of their lives, work, and social engagement without the need to be a “ministry” or to be under the banner of an institutional church. The side effect is a new freedom for ministers to be pastors again rather than CEOs.
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those of us called to shepherd God’s people can abandon the pressure to grow and manage a VLM and instead focus on our call to teach the Bible and administer the sacraments.
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How does the existing complexity keep God’s people occupied inside the structures of the organization rather than engaging the world He loves outside?
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So, in the past we had what appeared to be a relatively simple model for missions. The local church prepared a person, a dualistic eschatology motivated a person, and a denomination or parachurch institution deployed a person to the mission field. Because of this reliable formula, evangelical missions organizations grew throughout much of the twentieth century. They recruited more people and sent more of them overseas. The simple system worked.
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In many parts of the church, therefore, it isn’t the missionary who is most celebrated today, but the social activist—a pendulum swing with its own blindness and problems.
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Research has shown that in the last fifteen years, the average American’s attention span has decreased from twelve seconds to eight, which is one second less than a goldfish’s.2 That means to keep us engaged, local churches have become more and more like theaters and less and less like schools. Despite an explosion in the number of megachurches and Christian radio stations in the last forty years, statistics show younger evangelicals know less about the Bible and are less likely to have a Christian worldview than their parents. Church is more fun but less formative than ever before.
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“This institution,” he said, “wasn’t designed to take the place of the local church.” Students simply aren’t prepared for a Christian liberal arts education because they aren’t rooted in Christian faith. I’ve heard very similar struggles from the leaders of mission agencies.
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All of this means the familiar, simple system of preparing, motivating, and deploying Christians for the mission that worked in the past has become much, much more complicated.
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We are no longer prepared by the local church to advance that mission.
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nostalgia. We are reluctant to change our models or systems. We blame local churches—an easy target—for failing to support missions. We rely on an aging demographic of donors who are equally (and maybe more) nostalgic as we are for the way missions used to be, rather than cultivate new sources of revenue. All of this is a prescription for death by nostalgia.
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When things are no longer “the way they’re supposed to be” or “the way they used to be,” we become afraid. We become angry. Like Joshua, we want things put back in proper order. We want to return to the simple, linear, recongnizable way of operating because the old system made sense.
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the Bible and history have taught us anything, it’s that God is notoriously uncooperative at our attempts at controlling Him. We want to contain Him, institutionalize Him, and systematize Him so that we can ultimately understand, predict, and control Him.
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The complexity and chaos we are experiencing is meant to drive us back to dependence upon Him and shatter the false trust we’ve put in our system, structures, institutions.
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Complexity accelerates the mission of God.
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the spread of God’s presence among His people was always a good thing, even when it complicated simple systems, because ultimately it advances the mission of God.
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all the way through church history. What we perceive as unexpected, complicated, and undesirable, God uses to leap His mission ahead at a pace that we never could. So we need to be careful not to lament all complexity as bad, evil, or a scheme of the enemy.
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Rather than putting all of our resources into facilities, systems, and structures, which we may discover are Rube Goldberg machines, what if we allocated more resources for equipping people?
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And when people are equipped and filled with God’s Spirit, the mission will advance in suprising ways.
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Remember, Moses had ordered the elders to assemble at the tabernacle to receive God’s Spirit. Eldad and Medad had not followed Moses’s command but received the Spirit and were prophesying nonetheless. This threatened to undermine the simple, linear authority structure established by God and diminish Moses’s reputation among the people.
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The complexity that God unleashed by acting outside the expected system revealed the motives of Joshua’s heart. He wasn’t primarily concerned with the advancement of God’s work, but rather the protection of Moses’s leadership, and by extension his own.
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This is something we see in many legacy churches and organizations. God may have used a leader or institution in remarkable ways, but when the ministry encounters stagnation or decline due to unexpected complexities, they can begin to behave like Joshua. Rather than embracing a new movement of God, they become fixated on maintaining the old way of operating and may even express anger or outrage at those associated with the new approach.
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the Spirit can do amazing things through a leader and a ministry for many years, but if the Spirit shifts to blow in a new or unexpected direction, we may, like Joshua, resist this change. Rather than operate like the wind, we’d prefer the Spirit operate like an electric fan that we can control to perpetually blow in the same direction.
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Moses reacts very differently, however. Unlike Joshua, he does not resist the new thing God is doing. He does not take offense that the Spirit operated outside the bounds of his authority or leadership. He is not primarily concerned with his own reputation or the perpetuation of his ministry. Instead, Moses sees the bigger picture. He recognizes that there is something far better and more important than his leadership structure or organization.
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Moses recognizes that control is not the goal—empowerment is! He does not want the people dependent upon him to encounter God or know His will. He wants every person to experience the Lord as personally and as intimately as he does.
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maintaining those institutions. We have a goal greater than keeping control of resources. The entire purpose of churches, denominations, and missions organizations is to empower God’s people.
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As generations change and their values shift from the familiar ones that fueled evangelicalism over the last century, the temptation is to look backwards and cling to the way things used to be. The temptation is to be like Joshua and condemn the new, unexpected things complicating our lives and organizations and fight to keep our systems recognizable and under control. But in doing so, we may be impeding rather than advancing the movement of God in the world. Instead, we must embrace this new complexity, because it shatters our illusion of control, it advances the mission of God, and it ...more