2 Timothy 4:2-4
2 Preach the word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke and encourage—with great patience and careful instruction. 3 For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. 4 They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths. 5 But you, keep your head in all situations, endure hardship, do the work of an evangelist, discharge all the duties of your ministry.
The first time I read Tim Suttle's book, I thought I was going to tear out the pages. The first four chapters were so contrary to everything I had been taught and had come to believe. I would love to say that I had questions, but I did not. I had anger, resentment, and animosity. How could one author's sharp rebuke of the entirety of Christian success metrics cause this kind of torrential consternation in me?
It was not until I went to God in serious prayer and humility, as well as restarted the entire book, that I came to understand why it angered me so much, and why I was rejecting it as deeply as I was. I WANTED TO BE SUCCESSFUL, and what Suttle was saying went contrary to all of that. He said that every way I measured success was wrong, and that if I achieved what I wanted to achieve, I could have actually been UNSUCCESSFUL in my actual mission and charge from God.
Can you not hear my roiling mind? These are my thoughts which I wrote down during my reading...
"What do you mean that growing my church does not mean that I am successful?"
"More people does not mean more spiritual maturity?"
"A large 'audience' can be a sign of a cult of personality and not a true God focused Church?"
"It can be better for a church to shrink numerically if that shrinkage leads to deeper spiritual growth for those who remain?"
All of my life I had been told that the goal was to "pack 'em in" and let God do the rest. I was always taught that this was my role as a minister. I was just an evangelist who was there to set up a meeting, everything else was God's responsibility.
Therefore, in my mind, success meant more people, as many as I could find. Numbers were king. That was how I would know that I was successful.
But it is not about me, nor is it truly about the people in the pew, ultimately it is all about God.
It is about introducing unbelievers to Him, yes, but it is also about discipling them and finding the ones who are serious and helping them to find a deep, grounded, and fully mature relationship with Him.
It is about deepening spiritual maturity, not about throwing more people in the pews so the tithes will go up.
Suttle's greatest salvo came when he said that he would rather go to church with five dedicated believers than 100 "Sunday Only" Christians...
Had I really fallen for a metric? Had the numbers become what mattered to me? After all, how do you define success and development if you cannot quantify it and count it.
How... Utterly... American...
I do not say that to say that being an American is bad, but our tendency to need to quantify and qualify everything makes us particularly susceptible to this fallacy. We want... no, that's not strong enough... we NEED a metric, a number, a denominator to tell us if we are being successful.
But you cannot quantify spiritual growth with a number. It is lived out each and every day minute by minute, moment by moment, decision by decision in the lives of the believers who belong to your congregation. That is why we do not like to make that the goal, it is esoteric, and it drives us crazy.
Yet, as Suttle points out, the Great Commission was not to fill a sanctuary with random people so that God can do His thing, it was to go and make DISCIPLES who follow all that Christ taught and commanded us to do.
How in the world had I gotten it so backwards?
And so my paradigm shifted.
Sure, I still want more people to come and to know Christ, but I no longer consider that success, it has become to me nothing more an increased opportunity. Success now looks like me knowing that my congregation engages in personal Bible Study, REAL study.
Success for me now means knowing that families are having devotional times. Success for me now means knowing that my congregants are a praying people, and that they have made prayer central in their lives. It also means that they help others and live a Biblical lifestyle.
It does not mean that they come to church so that I can add another tally mark on a stat sheet and get a few more coins in the coffer.
It was amazing to me the change that this understanding sparked in me. I ceased to see my congregants as a means to an end, and begun to see them AS the end. THEY were the reason for my ministry. THEIR DAILY LIVES AND CHOICES were the metric by which my success could be measured... which brings me to the biggest change that this book created in me...
It is not my success.
I was not called to be successful, I was called to be faithful.
I was called to be a faithful steward to those whom God has entrusted to my care. And if the Lord saw fit to bring about an increase, it was reason to celebrate Him, because HE was being successful.
When I stopped worrying about numbers, when "shrinking" no longer scared me to the core, when I realized that the church could get smaller and yet be more successful at the same time, I found myself free to engage in the ministry of the Church. My job was to help people grow closer to God, and if some left because they did not want to do that, then all I can do is pray for them and continue to witness.
After all, my calling is to be faithful, not successful.
And if I have any success at all, it is in finding that truth.
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