In the course of my life I’ve made quite the internal journey around the ideas of competition and success. In my adolescent years I thrived in competitive environments. I spent much of my Middle and High School years playing sports in highly competitive contexts. Whether it was competing against other players to earn a spot on a team or in the starting lineup, or competing against other teams to claim tournament titles, I always competed. My mindset kept me focused not on being the best I could be but on being better than the person or the team next to me. My coaches called this attitude of being better than others a “commitment to excellence.”
As I concluded my High School years and left the world of competitive sports in my past, I began to notice ways I had been shaped by this competitive context that I didn’t like. The way I thought about others always had a tinge of me vs. them. I began working hard to swing the pendulum in the opposite direction. While I learned some healthy and helpful things about how to view and relate to others, the end result led me to a place where very few things in my life were persuade with excellence. I developed such a focus on harmony and compliance that any pursuit of excellence became swallowed up in complacency wearing the mask of community.
Over the last decade of professional experience, I’ve sought to discover a middle ground that both reflects the highest ideals of peace, contentment, and harmony in God’s Kingdom while still holding onto a way of operating that produces outcomes that bear the markers of excellence.
On a theological level, I’ve found great impetus for this middle ground through a growing appreciation for the creation story and how that speaks into our continued ministry efforts. In the beginning, God creates that which is not just good, but very good. There is a creative and communal excellence to it. In God’s creation we find mystery, joy, beauty, delight, and majesty. The excellence of God’s creative efforts never come at the expense of harmony, peace, or human dignity. This has become the mark I seek to attain in my ministry efforts, and I want to share some principles I believe can help you facilitate this same balance in your ministry pursuits.
Ministry excellence comes from the overflow
The default first steps in our pursuit of excellence always have to do with effort and activity. We have core beliefs that we achieve the state of excellence by doing more so that we can increase the output of whatever we define as “good.”
This works well in a factory setting, where the input of raw materials equals the output of a predictable quantity of product. However, faith and ministry don’t work like factories. The endeavors of the Spirit lack predictability, formula, or blueprint. Because of this fundamental difference, the first and most important place for effort and activity in any ministry activity is to cultivate deeper spiritual roots through increased engagement in spiritual practices – whether it be prayer, Scripture reading, worship, silence, simplicity or any other practice that deepens your connection with God.
This investment in the spiritual creates reservoirs of spiritual energy and facilitates spiritual formation that fuel every ministry effort. Just like in creation, which begins and finds its sustenance in God, so our ministry efforts must find this same starting point and source of ongoing support. This spiritual investment fosters the overflow that generates exciting, engaging, and, most importantly, transformative ministry activity.
Ministry success must be measured in transformation more than attraction
The question of success in the church context has created questions, confusion, and controversy among church leaders ever since Christians began organizing institutional communities. Do we find success because people show up? If so, how many people need to show up? Does it become more successful if we have the same people showing up repeatedly, or if we see new people showing up? Is it still successful if we have lots of people showing up but their lives become no different because of their presence?
In our wrestling with this question here at Westover, we’ve become firmly convinced that the number of people showing up on Sunday and the number of dollars deposited in the account do not serve as the most effective indicators of success. In an effort to follow this conviction, we actually ceased reporting our weekly attendance and offering in our church wide communications for roughly a year and a half. This change in our communication efforts, more than any other change in the last 5 years, caught people’s attention. We actually began reporting this information again because of the volume of time spent each week answering individual questions people sent in about these two figures.
This goes to show how deeply ingrained our sense that attendance and offering serve as critical markers of success. I’ll admit that these two metrics serve an important role in describing organizational health. However, that has little to do with spiritual or Kingdom success.
The true metrics that defines success have to do with the ways in which the lives of people connected with our ministry efforts are changed because of their participation in these efforts. These don’t have easy measurements, but we can ask insightful questions to help us evaluate our progress toward this end:
- Do the fruits of the Spirit grow in their lives as a result?
- Do they grow in their sense of participation in God’s mission?
- Do they discover the value they play as members of the Body of Christ?
- Do they grow in their confidence to have spiritual conversation with loved ones?
When we begin answering yes to these questions, then we can say that we are making progress toward success in ministry.
Ministry excellence has more to do with diligence than perfection
The traditional understanding of success and excellence has so much to do with doing something the right way to achieve the right results. Whether we look at athletics, the arts, or even business, we see story after story of those who achieve success on the shoulders of getting their craft right. However, when we talk of excellence in the ministry context, we must hold onto the inherent mystery and dynamic nature of the task. On a fundamental level, ministry consists of the efforts we make to pursued people we cannot control toward life change in ways they cannot generate apart from God. With this understanding in mind, it becomes absurd to think we could ever do ministry in a way that guarantees a desired outcome.
With this in mind, consider that true excellence in ministry comes from our diligent commitment to faithfulness. We work, strive, labor, and persist not because we aim to do the right thing that will produce the right results. We continue on in our effort because we believe God’s faithfulness will be brought to light in the midst of our faithfulness, and this is a truly excellent thing.
As we grapple with how to conduct ministry in ways that achieve long-term sustainability and impact, we find great possibility in the practices of evaluation, adaption, and excellence. I hope you can grapple with some of these pieces that have been introduced and find tangible points you can incorporate into your work so that what you’re doing today can blossom into something that continues to give life and shine light far into the future.
Something to Think About 