Failure

Fear of failure leads to an inability to learn and grow.  A prerequisite for discipleship, on the other hand, is the acknowledgement that we are in need of help from Jesus to become fully functioning human beings.  Even more so, when we step into ministry leadership, we must be willing to embrace failure as a necessary part of the process.

As Christians and as leaders we should be constantly seeking to grow and improve, not out of some sick sense of God's displeasure, but quite the opposite, out of the knowledge that God is completely for us.  In our society there are certain people we allow to see our weaknesses, foibles, and failures.  They are our coaches, our doctors, our psychologists, our lawyers, our accountants, our personal trainers, or our beauticians.  We let them see our failures because we know that they have a vested interest in our success, they only succeed as our coach, if we succeed in the athletic arena.

For some reason, however, we balk at bringing that same level of vulnerability into the church.  I believe that God wants us to know His deep and abiding pleasure and affirmation, precisely so that we can then enter into the process of receiving and responding to His discipline and training!

This is practical for us!  Will we respond to our present efforts with an ever watchful posture of growth and improvement?  Or will we respond to our present efforts by defensively maintaining the status quo?

I believe that God has a future for us as a church that is much more glorious than anything we have ever seen!  We must be willing to embrace failure, however, if we are going to see that glorious future.  Below is a TED talk and a short article that I found encouraging on this topic:

Forbes Article on the Importance of Failure in the Marketplace

Paper Pt XXI: Do We Really Want Success?

FAITHFUL BRIDE OR SUCCESSFUL SERVANT

The Cross is the God-sanctioned corrective to self-seeking humanity. It is the message of salvation, and the method of salvation. Jesus, fully God and fully human, was crucified to end the power of rebellion. As people joined to Him through the Cross and shaped by that same Cross, we must craft our praxis from a fully ‘Cruciform’ theology. It is not overly critical to say that we are too often missing the point. We, for all our attempts at orthodoxy, often fail at orthopraxy.

It is obvious that our failure at this point will not hamper God’s ability to move forward His Kingdom agenda. In the long run it may not matter much to God, it will, however, matter to us. In missing the point of God’s Kingdom project we will simply write ourselves out of redemptive history. Other movements have done so, will ours?

It is unlikely that the Vineyard movement will soon succumb to anything like what has stricken many of the mainline denominations. Perhaps, considering our spiritual DNA, we may never end up in the dry dustbin of bureaucratic structure and stale institutionalization with its incipient credentialism. There are, however, other ways of missing the point; crass commercialism and rampant individualism contradict the Cross as surely as calcified institutionalism. Ego-driven success is surely a sin as great as milquetoast mediocrity.

We must do away with standards of success that do not align with scripture, that are flatly contradicted by the life and ministry of the apostles, and stand in contradiction to the power of the Cross. Perhaps we should do away with the language of ‘success’ altogether. Mother Teresa was asked (in light of the continuing problem of global poverty and in spite of her heroic life-long efforts) if she ever got discouraged. She responded, “No. God doesn’t call me to be successful, God calls me to be faithful.”50 Scripture says the same thing, only in different words.

16"In that day," declares the LORD, you will call me 'my husband'; you will no longer call me 'my master.' 

17I will remove the names of the Baals from her lips; no longer will their names be invoked.

Hosea 2:16-17

It is our drive towards ‘success’ that has brought the Baals of individualism and consumerism into the Church. My prayer is that this paper would encourage the Church to cease striving to be a successful servant, and seek instead to become a faithful Bride.

Paper Pt XIV: A Successful Church

The Cross and Ecclesiastical Success

It should be clear to any individual reading the canonical gospels that our formulation of a ‘successful ministry’ was foreign to Jesus. Perhaps we had better restate that; it was not foreign to Jesus in that He was unaware of the concept, but rather in that He explicitly and repeatedly rejected such a concept of success. Jesus deliberately rejected fame and the approval of the crowds,38 He hid from people who wanted to be with Him,39 said and did things that made people leave,40 and used a metaphor of torture and death for discipleship.41

12) Carrying the Cross – Our Master has made it clear, by personal example, and plain teaching, we must embrace suffering, and die to self. This stands in direct contradiction to the stated aim of most Church programming. A friend attributed the following anecdote to pastor Rob Bell (Mars Hill Bible Church, Grandville, MI): He was asked by a visitor, “what programs do you have here to meet the needs of me and my family?” If only more pastors would give this response, “we only have one program here, ‘Come and Die!’ “

13) Identification with the Broken – If the Cross is the center of the Church then we should share the same passions as the man who hung from that Cross. We should find, welling up within us, an attraction to those places where we might encounter hunger, danger, injustice, addiction, oppression, or poverty. This is the shame of the Western Church, we have retreated from the brokenness of the world, and then congratulated ourselves on how well our programs work without those broken people. We must reverse the trend of Christians emigrating to homogenized suburban communities pursuing idols of safety and security.

14) Necessary Failure – If the Cross is our Victory, then we must reexamine our language of ‘success.’ For Jesus, success, was abandonment and failure. We must think through our use of language; we say, “healthy things grow,” but Jesus said, “unless a seed dies, it will produce nothing.”42 Our yearning for success has more in common with the gospel of prosperity, than the gospel of the Kingdom. We must create contexts where failure is a part of our culture, where our failure and that of others is a normal occurrence, and where polished presentation is not the sign of God’s presence.43

Of course none of this is a repudiation of God’s good creation. Embracing the Cross is not an end in itself; but rather the only road to Resurrection and New Creation. Rebellious humanity needs to be crucified with Christ, not because we are human, but because we are rebels.

God has glorified Jesus and has promised to glorify us in Him. His very promises of justice are an affirmation of creation. We must prevent, however, an attempt at justice that does not involve the Cross, for that would not be justice. Resurrection is on the other side of the Cross. We must embrace the lessons taught by suffering, we must submit our egos to death, indeed, the motive behind our lust for success is simple pride.

Thanks PM

Reggie McNeal Main Session Unleashed Conference 2010 from Unleashed Network on Vimeo.

The Importance of the Big Picture

"Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat."
Sun Tzu (400 BC–330 BC)

The Process Supersedes the Result

"In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable."
Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969)

Let's Play

Ray Hollenbach framed part of the conversation by essentially asking 'where exactly is the playing field?'

I'd like to continue in that vein:

Just who is 'everybody?'

This is largely a strength of the Vineyard. When we say everybody, we really do mean it. We make a real effort to train and include laity in ministry; women and men, even children, people of all backgrounds and social classes.

The only real 're-thinking' I see necessary at this point is in the inherent tension between 'excellence in ministry' and allowing the visibly broken to play. I have seen new Christians, non-Christians, those with drug problems, and even those presently under the influence of drugs, all ministering in Vineyard churches in some capacity. However, there is a real attempt to prevent these types of people from engaging in 'real' ministry. We will let them hold the door (if they're pretty enough), or let them print fliers, or play the drums (if they're capable enough), but there are real boundaries we place upon just what they are allowed to do.

For the record, I am not advocating placing drunk agnostics in the pulpit, I would certainly agree that there are standards for Christian ministry. The question that must be grappled with is this:

Is the bar we set for Christian ministry about 'excellence' or is it about 'health?' Do we prevent some from certain places in ministry and Church life because they are unseemly, or because they would hurt themselves or others?

I contend that Scripture has no value for 'excellence in ministry' that is ultimately a cover for excluding those people who might make things slower, uglier, or technically flawed. Our decisions to include someone in ministry should be based on whether the individual is healthy enough to step into a particular role, not whether they are skilled enough.

This decision has tremendous communicative properties...

Just what do we mean by 'play?'

It is here that we must give significant energy to re-thinking current practices.

We largely conceive of ministry in terms of practices and care/direction given to Church members or performed on their behalf. Ministry is preaching and teaching, ministry is playing musical instruments, administrating the needs of the church, leading Bible-studies, praying for people, even maintaining church buildings and running technical equipment, etc.

The results of such a definition is manifold, the most problematic are the two following: 1) Christians who are deeply engaged in ministry yet have little or no involvement in mission, 2) Christians who view 'real ministry' as being done by the professionals while viewing their jobs as distractions from Kingdom work.

We must rethink this conception.

Play must fundamentally mean mission! Leaders should be player/coaches who equip others for ministry to the world.

As a pastor I am naturally focused on the local faith community of which I am a member/leader. This must not be allowed to divert my own focus from the wider community that is the object and context for the Church's mission. This must not be allowed to 'leak down' onto the church, causing the stale atmosphere of spiritual inbreeding that is a result of a church that ministers to itself.

Play must include the entire scope of human activity. Almost all occupations can be Christian vocations.

As a pastor I am resourced to take future church leaders through an equipping process. I can teach someone how to lead church activities. I am competent to teach people how to live a life of spiritual disciplines. But when it comes to the single largest fact of most peoples daily lives, I am left with one of two options for discipleship. 1) Quit your job so you can do 'real ministry.' 2) Pray for and witness to your co-workers while maintaining personal integrity at your workplace. What is largely missing is any sense of training people to view their occupations as their vocations.

Scoring Goals

It is here that the Church has the largest problem, and hence, the largest need for re-imagination. Our system rewards and reinforces a view of ministry that is largely out of sync with our stated philosophy of ministry. We say everybody gets to play, but the rules of the game, and the way in which we 'score goals' (ie incentives and definitions of success) are set up to prevent everybody from playing. Of course this is unintentional, but still true!

A 'winning' church (to continue the metaphor) is defined by characteristics that have nothing to do with 'everybody getting to play.' Because of this we simultaneously recognize a need to have everyone play, while attempting to keep the star players in the game as long as possible; in our system you can't score goals with mediocre performance. Because of this, we give some attention to the idea of workplace ministry, but it somehow never really makes it into the playbook; you can't score goals by practicing law, or building bridges, only by proclaiming the gospel or praying for people. In short, our definition of success prevents us from implementing this value more fully.

Our most essential task is to create a system of in which 'everybody gets to play' is itself one of the markers for success, is itself defined as one of the ways in which we 'score points.'

Redefining a Successful Local Church: Planting Churches that Plant Churches

The Lesson from Evolutionary Biology

People often have difficulty grasping one of the basic tenets of biology. It is simple to understand, and once you 'get it' it becomes the most obvious truism. The difficulty lies not in the complexity of the thing to be understood, but in the conceptions we already hold that predispose us to other ways of thinking. We are so used to thinking about things in a certain manner, that it becomes difficult to conceive, much less think critically, in any other manner. This difficulty has to do with the evolutionary fitness or 'success' of a particular organism.

More specifically, it is the definition of evolutionary fitness that is difficult for people to see. An organism's biological 'success' is determined solely and completely by its ability to reproduce. Reproduction is defined and measured by the ability of the parent to produce viable offspring, the greater the number of viable offspring, the greater the success of the parent. Viability is, of course, defined by the ability to reach mature reproductive age and produce yet another generation of offspring.

The reason this can be difficult to grasp is that our own conception of success is so radically different. We are used to thinking of success in terms of strength, size, skill, power, intelligence, virtue, even pleasure; in short, we are used to a definition of success that thinks solely in terms of the well-being of the parent organism without any regard for the relationship of that organism to the future of its genetic code.

The parallels to the Church should here become obvious...

A Successful Church

My main contention here has to do with our definition of success. While it would be pushing the analogy too far to suggest a one-to-one correlation, I contend that our definition of church success must share the same emphasis on reproduction that we see in evolutionary biology. There are of course, other concerns when it comes to church health and faithfulness to our King; love and devotion to Jesus, deep and powerful ties to each other, practical initiatives to peace and justice in the world; but these can perhaps be seen as the content of the genetic code, whereas success is conceived as perpetuating those Kingdom genes.

We must be explicit and clear on this, a successful church is one that produces other churches, in short, it is imperative that we tie organizational success to reproduction.

Competing Paradigms

This is not, however, the definition of Church success that we have inherited. The Vineyard (and those within it) come squarely out of the 20th Century American Evangelical tradition. We have differentiated ourselves in significant ways from that tradition (without repudiating it), but have yet to significantly differentiate ourselves from the ubiquity of 'Church Growth' methods and theories that hold sway within that tradition. We still largely define success as our American Evangelical cousins do: the strength, size, skill, power, intelligence, virtue, even pleasure, that is present within the local congregation. In short, we are used to a definition of success that thinks solely in terms of the well-being of the parent organism without any regard for the relationship of that organism to the future of its genetic code.

I know of too many 'mega-churches' with no value for church planting. They are the envy of all of the churches and christians in the area, yet they are like a wealthy, elite, but aging, suburbanite wife, who has produced no children, and is growing more and more concerned with bridge games, botox treatments, and social events. No one seems to notice, nor to point out, that these healthy churches are not healthy at all. They are sterile...

No one I know would point to a young woman who was biologically incapable of becoming pregnant as a model of health, yet we have little difficulty thinking the Bride of Christ is healthy, while remaining barren. So how is it that we can divorce health from reproduction?

Practical Methods for Redefinition

The real problem, is that we hold these churches up as models to replicate in our own location, when they are incapable of replicating themselves! We are blinded by the sheen of consumerism and the glow of individualism to the reality of God's vision for the church.

We must begin to hold up different models.

We must stop buying books from large church pastors, we must stop reading their blogs, we must stop placing them in places of denominational leadership, we must stop inviting them to teach at conferences. We must stop counting Sunday attendance, we must stop talking about these numbers. We must stop using these as measurements of success.

We must start spotlighting individuals and communities who are planting churches! We must read their books and blogs. Invite them to speak at our conferences and lead our denominations. We must start counting the number of church plants sent out, and the number of church plants that have planted others.

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For those of you interested in some further reading, I have attached a link to a series of posts exploring three other metaphors for Church that deal explicitly with reproduction and missional success. They came out of a sermon I preached at a friends church a few years back intended to spur on the cause of New Church Planting:

Apples, Dandelions, and Horse Manure

"Success is..."

If you haven't read it yet, click on the title link to read a previous post, and read also the comments to it.

Much of what passes for the definition of "ministry success" (no offense to those who find value in it) stands in opposition to the methods Jesus Himself engaged in to "build" His ministry. Success is defined in terms of how many people have attended a particular event, the size of our budget, or the square footage of our building. By these terms Jesus was an utter failure. He had no operating budget, or a building; and as for body count, the man kept sending everyone away!!!!

Those who answered the previous post by pointing to obedience to Jesus, and love for God and neighbor, are certainly correct...

...however, I had better rephrase the question:

Granting that success is defined by our obedience to Jesus, and that 'obedience to Jesus' is defined by our love for God and our love for people, what is an accurate measure of that success?

What is the fruit that will show that the tree is healthy?
Matthew 7:15-20


The answer Jesus gives is that we would leave something behind us (John 15:16); if we look to Jesus we can see in His life a model for us to follow. If we would judge our lives a success by the standard Jesus set then we must first begin by stating that 'success' is to be measured by the people who follow after us...

...it has been said:

"Success is defined by our successors!"

Jesus made many baffling decisions if His ministry is to be evaluated by much of what passes for 'church growth' today. He sent people away without even a basic understanding of the gospel, He refused to let people follow Him, ran away and hid from them when they wanted to give Him a place of prominence and authority in their community, was constantly avoiding the influential people in society in favor of people who had nothing to offer, would consistently tell people things that were phrased in such a way that they either plotted to kill Him or simply left His ministry altogether; in fact, Jesus seems to have been more interested in 'Church Growth Governors' than in conventional and contemporary 'Church Growth' wisdom.

Why did Jesus do things the way He did them? Because He measured success by the lives of the disciples He left behind Him. He knew that no matter how large His Church became, there was not the possibility of 'success' if He was the only one to take responsibility for what God wants to do upon the earth. In fact, the whole goal of Jesus ministry was not to 'reach people with the gospel' (as we often think of this term) but rather to help a small group of people to learn how to live in God's presence so fully that they would be able to teach others how to do the same thing. (Which is what Jesus meant when He used the term gospel...)

God is not concerned with externals...

...He is truly concerned that each person would become the woman or man that they were intended to be (a unique reflection of the Son of God and Son of Man, Jesus), and so would rather spend three years teaching twelve men how to 'be' then lead 10,000 people in a 'sinner's prayer,' or gather 20,000 into a group, or oversee the construction of a giant community center/meeting hall, or raise 1,000,000 dollars.

Define Success

I have been given opportunity to reflect, as of late, upon what exactly defines "success" in a church. If the answer to this question is to be in any sense of the word "Christian," then of course this definition must originate in the person and work of Jesus.

How would Jesus define "success" in a Church?

I'd love to hear your feedback...

(don't worry, I'll post the "correct" answer later)