Monday, June 14, 2010

Hello! And a Little Tidbit...

So, a crazy thing has been happening lately.  People have been reading my blog.  I don't get it.  I've hardly posted in like two months and yet random people that I don't know keep following my blog.  It's not even halfway through the year and I've already surpassed my page-load stats from last year.  Granted, I think I forgot to add in the counter code back in for a little while last year after Blogger changed some things up, but still.  I'm not really sure why you're here, but you're welcome to stay!  Maybe one of these days I'll get on the ball and actually post regularly!

In the mean time, here's a little tidbit I've been thinking a lot about lately - the church's definition of "success." Churches have limited resources, so they have to use some metric to determine which ministries get money and  how much.  Frequently that metric is "we've always done it, so we have to keep doing it."  While that's not necessarily the best of metrics, it's also far from the worst.  I'm not talking about that one right now.  Next to that one though, the metric tends to be "results."  But how does a church gauge results?  Well, we're told not to judge, so it's not like we can look at the people involved in the ministry and decide whether or not spiritual growth has occurred.  So what do we do instead?  Well, we look at the numbers.  How many people are coming?  How many people have had a need met by the ministry?

And we want to see results right away.  Because it's God's money and we don't want to waste it.

So what would you call someone who plugged away at their ministry for three years.  Heart and soul poured into it.  Every moment of every day he was either meeting needs, teaching, or preparing to do one or the other.  And at the end of those three years, even with miraculous things happening, there were only 120 people who were "regular attenders."  Oh, there were other hangers-on, but really only 120 were into it.  The modern church, I think, would call that man a failure.

I'd call Him Jesus.

Maybe we should rethink our metrics and our definitions of success.

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