From Dallas Willard in The Divine Conspiracy:
Intense devotion to God by the individual or group brings substantial outward success. Outward success brings a sense of accomplishment and a sense of responsibility for what has been achieved - and for further achievement. For onlookers the outward success is the whole thing. The sense of accomplishment and responsibility reorients vision away from God to what we are doing and are to do - usually to the applause and support of sympathetic people. The mission increasingly becomes the vision. It becomes what we are focused upon. The mission and ministry is what we spend our thoughts, feelings, and strength upon. Goals occupy the place of the vision of God in the inward life, and we find ourselves caught up in a vision-less pursuit of various goals. Grinding it out.
From the Summer 2008 Ockenga Connections:
Contrary to what we would guess by looking at row upon row of books on leadership at Borders and our neighborhood Christian bookstore, the New Testament speaks very little about being a good leader. There really is so little biblical evidence for the need for big visionary dreamers. The clarion call of the Gospels is all about becoming good followers. This is what Jesus asks of us: to be humble dreamers with enough sense to follow him. (David Horn)
D.A. Carson comments on 1 Corinthians 3:13, "Each one's work will become manifest, for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed by fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done."
This ought to be extremely sobering to all who are engaged in vocational ministry. It is possible to "build the church" with such shoddy materials that at the last day you have nothing to show for your labor. People may come, feel "helped," join in corporate worship, serve on committees, teach Sunday school classes, bring their friends, enjoy "fellowship," raise funds, participate in counseling sessions and self-help groups, but still not really know the Lord. If the church is being built with large portions of charm, personality, easy oratory, positive thinking, managerial skills, powerful and emotional experiences, and people smarts, but without the repeated, passionate, Spirit-anointed proclamation of "Jesus Christ and him crucified," we may be winning more adherents than converts. Not for a moment am I suggesting that, say, managerial skills are unnecessary, or that basic people skills are merely optional. But the fundamental nonnegotiable, that without which the church is no longer the church, is the gospel, God's "folly," Jesus Christ and him crucified. (The Cross and Christian Ministry)
From Ed Stetzer:
If evangelicals are to be successful in reaching North American urban centers in church planting, we must abandon the thinking that ten acres of land and a brick building are essential in order to be successful. A true New Testament church can meet on the sixteenth floor of a high-rise building just as surely as any First Presbyterian Church can meet on the county seat town square. With the birth of the twenty-first century and the changes it has ushered in, we must redefine good stewardship in the context of land purchase and buildings. We need new paradigms for new times. For those who are not called or convinced by a house church model, we still have to abandon a building centered model if we are to reach this new reality.
From the book From Embers to a Flame: How God Can Revitalize Your Church:
Some believe that churches grow primarily through the application of successful business principles. Others take an approach that is reminiscent of Hollywood - entertaining people and calling it worship so that they will "have a good time" and want to come back. And the philosophy of some seems to have been borrowed from the psychiatrist's couch, of all places. Their emphasis is a therapeutic self-help program providing support and solutions for our deepest emotional needs, rather than the transforming power of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Indeed, most churches today seem to have adopted the Wall Street/corporate model, the Hollywood/entertainment model, or the psychiatrist/therapeutic model.
Helpful insights can be gained from each of these modern models, but none of them captures a biblical approach to church revitalization...
LT on measuring success as church:
We need to change what we measure and how we measure our success.
- Do people have a proper understanding of the gospel?
- Do they love the people that can offer them nothing in return?
- Are people willing to sacrifice for others?
- Are people becoming more like Christ in their values and behaviour?
- Do they have life and freedom?
If we considered these things, we would realize the state we are in and we would change. As long as we measure things based on our own personal satisfaction or by the markers of organizational success we will miss the point.
From a book review by Katie Galli in the April 2008 issue of Christianity Today:
Yes, we're Americans. We multitask all day long. Efficiency is one of our top cultural values. I, too, am pragmatic. I'd like to use Sunday morning to worship God, to get a few pointers on how to improve my relationship with Jesus, and to reconnect with community. But every Sunday, the first words I hear are, "Blessed be God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit." And I'm reminded that we gather weekly not to hear a practical talk on how to better live out our faith or to provide a venue to tell our friends about Jesus. We gather to corporately worship God, to celebrate the redeeming work of Christ on the cross, and to remember that our lives are not about us.
A provocative post by Ruth Tucker that challenges our emphasis on leadership:
Leadership is a hot topic today. Colleges and universities and seminaries and churches and Christian organizations of all varieties are developing leadership programs...
It was not until I was teaching through the course a second time that I realized what a crock this whole topic is. It’s phony from beginning to end—especially as it relates to biblical models.
That Jesus was a failed leader both by example and by teaching is something we already know—at least unconsciously....Plain and simple, Jesus was a failed leader—though it’s critical to point out that Jesus did not aspire to leadership.
Read the entire post for the full context.
I just may have to read Tucker's upcoming book Leadership Reconsidered.
Rob Harrison with a helpful post that helps us see the usefulness of the institution, while also recognizing its limitations:
The institution is just a structure to organize our activities to help us function...The institution is a dead thing that protects and gives form to the live thing underneath. But that points us to the reality that the structure isn't going to do the work of the church, because the structure isn't the church; we together are the church, and the structure is there to enable us as we do the work of the church. To avoid facing that, though, we tend to pile those expectations on the institution instead, and then when it fails, we blame it, and denounce it, and set off to find a better way...
I also suspect that we object to the 'institutional church' because it gets in the way of us doing what we want; but in reality, that's part of its purpose. Yes, there is a tendency for institutions to become self-justifying and self-serving, and that's a bad thing; but is that the fault of institutions, or of the people in them? That's a human sin, and attacking institutions won't change it. If anything, doing that makes it worse, because the existence of the institution, for all its faults, reminds us that it has a purpose. We can still do all the touchy-feely 'spirituality' stuff that's all about us without any kind of formal structure, but a congregation that never really goes beyond that is about as self-justifying and self-serving as anything can be; what we need the institution for is to do the things that take us beyond ourselves, the things that actually require work and effort and need organization and structure to support them and keep them going.
C.S. Lewis on dying to ourselves:
Your real, new self (which is Christ's and also yours, and yours just because it is His) will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him...The principle runs through all life from top to bottom. Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favorite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fiber of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.
