Reframing Success in Ministry: Obedience

The new Missional Ministry Metrics

It is His Church, Not Mine
In college, I was a huge Steve Camp fan. In the late 1980’s and early 1990’s he wrote and recorded some of the most challenging music the church has ever heard. Well, let me say that I do not know how much of it the church actually heard, but it was played on Christian radio stations across the country. He called the church to wake up and realize that the gospel we believe was neither easy nor cheap. It requires us to examine our lives, to minister to the outcast, and love the unlovable. I attended a few of his concerts during that period of time. I was even a “counselor” at one of them. I also had almost all his albums. My iPod is filled with his music.

One morning during my daily worship time with God a couple of years ago, a phrase popped into my head from one of Steve’s songs. At least I thought it was one of his songs. The phrase was, “Lest the Lord build this house, oh, we labor in vain”. I googled that phrase to see if I could uncover the song. What I wasn’t prepared for was the journey that search would take me on, the scriptures I would uncover, and the reminder God would give me that day. I never did find the name of that song, but I began a journey that has impacted my ministry and understanding of church forever.

The phrase that I googled turned out to be the first verse of Ps. 127. In the ESV version, the psalm is:

1 Unless the LORD builds the house,
those who build it labor in vain.
Unless the LORD watches over the city,
the watchman stays awake in vain.
2 It is in vain that you rise up early
and go late to rest,
eating the bread of anxious toil;
for he gives to his beloved sleep.
3 Behold, children are a heritage from the LORD,
the fruit of the womb a reward.
4 Like arrows in the hand of a warrior
are the children of one’s youth.
5 Blessed is the man
who fills his quiver with them!
He shall not be put to shame
when he speaks with his enemies in the gate.

What lept from my browser was verse one, “Unless the LORD builds the house, those who build it labor in vain.” It was the phrase I has searched for but I had thought it was part of a song about raising up children. The context I found it in through this Psalm transformed my understanding. It is not your house. It is God’s house. Anything He does not build is a failed labor.

From there, my mind moved immediately to the first chapter of Mark. In verse 16, Jesus begins calling his disciples. He approaches Peter and Andrew with the invitation to “Follow me, and I will make you become fishers of men.” The causative nature of the verb renders the meaning “I will cause you to become.” The call that Jesus issued was to simply follow him. He would work in their lives to cause them to be conformed to his image and plan.

Then, my mind immediately ran to Matthew 16. Jesus is having a discussion with his disciples about who people think he is. In the course of that discussion Peter loudly proclaims that Jesus was the Christ, the son of the living God. Jesus responds,
“Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” (Matthew 14:17b-19, emphasis mine) Jesus reminded me that morning that He will build His church. The church that He builds will march forward and challenge the gates of hell. In fact, hell cannot withstand the movement of the church that God builds.

It’s Not Your Church
I can’t tell you how many times someone has asked me, “How’s your church doing?” I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard someone say, “Pastor so and so has built a great church in…” or “This pastor is doing incredible things at _______ church”. I just cringe. What I hope they are saying is that this pastor is seeking God and letting God provide him with direction and action and he is being obedient to what God is directing him to do. That’s what I hope people are saying. I have to admit that I’m not sure that is not the true intention, but I will try to give them the benefit of the doubt.

The truth of the scripture is that the church I pastor is not my church. It never has and it never will be. If it does become my church, then I have elevated myself as the builder, a role only reserved for the Godhead. It is not my role. It is not your role. If the church I pastor becomes the church I build then I have labored in vain. It is a worthless construction. In fact, if we build a church based on personality, methodology or anything else, we have built a church that is a weak, self-focused, and lacking the right foundation. It will not last. It is not a church Jesus would build.

Neil Cole helped solidify this understanding for me in his book,Organic Church: Growing Faith Where Life Happens. Early in the book he reminds us that Jesus bought the church with his own blood (Acts 20:28). He says, “The church is Jesus’ building project, and He fully intends to live in it. If Jesus is at work building His church, it will be beautiful and solid. He doesn’t do sloppy work.” (1)

The church should be growing. When something is built, it does get bigger. It also gets more structurally sound as the pieces interact to create support for the whole building. If one of the systems of an organism does not work properly, it will diminish the ability of the entire organism to function effectively and properly. Ask anyone with a knee injury how the rest of their body was impacted by one joint being damaged. The church will grow as people surrender more of themselves to Jesus and as people are introduced to Jesus through His movement in their lives.

However, this does not necessarily mean that the local church will keep getting bigger or even that it should continue to get larger. In fact, “[m]ost warm-blooded living things grow to a point and then reproduce. This is how the body of Christ is to grow. The huge mega churches of this past century will be looked upon as an anomaly, not the norm, of our time in history.” (2)

I build nothing. But I do have a role.
I love the calling of the disciples. The world would cast these rather insignificant fellows aside. There is no way these men would have made much of a name for themselves other than through the calling of Jesus. Nevertheless, Jesus saw something in these men and he sought them out to follow him. He would be their teacher and they would be his disciples. Therefore, they freed up their calendars for the next few years and joined up. It beat fishing every day of their life. Maybe it would bring a little excitement to their lives.

When Jesus issued the call in Mark, he made them a promise. “If you will just follow me,” he said, “I’ll see to it that your lives are changed.” Notice who brought the change: Jesus It was not their responsibility to be make themselves fishers of men. It was Jesus’ responsibility. The disciple’s responsibility (and thus the same for the pastor, minister, and Christian in general) was to simply follow and be obedient.

Our roles as pastors or staff or even just Christ followers within the church are defined by this calling. Our responsibility is not to see a large building built or even an abundance of ministries. Our role is to be obedient to the task God places in our lives. Size matters only for the consumerist among us.

It is also our role as Christians to help others to follow and be obedient to the calling of Christ as well. Our role is to partner with the Godhead to see a person transformed by the power of the Godhead and move into a deep, penetrating, and self-denying relationship with Him. That is our success. To see a person being conformed into the image of Christ, his death, and the fellowship of his sufferings is our measure of success.

Let me say it clearly. The success metric of the scripture is not church size. One of the success metrics of scripture is obedience to the leading of the Godhead. Success is not found in large church buildings or in many different campuses. Success is found as people find themselves participating in the story of God, in a relationship of conformity to the life and death of Jesus, and obedient to the Trinity.

To see success as numbers only finds us participating in the consumerism that our culture has transformed the church into. Our understanding of success must be Cross Cultural, not simply cultural.

Notes:
1. Organic Church: Growing Faith Where Life Happens, Neil Cole, 9
2. Ibid.

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