criteria of success?
I met with a Church yesterday. Two elders and the newly appointed minister. They had come to look at our newly renovated warehouse and to hear about our journey of creating diverse congregations and missional teams over the last five years.
The new minister is pretty talented. He has a background in community services work and within a few months he has started to get funding and organised many innovative and exciting missional work.
But, you know as I listened it struck me that the language of the elders and the minister were very different. The elders were dreaming of lots of new people at their Sunday morning service and the minister was talking about connecting and serving with their community around them.
It struck me that this type of cross talking happens all the time in Churches. The criteria for what is “success” is different for different people. And often it all ends in tears.
The task of leadership is often to begin with some definition. To re-enter the biblical story enough that we grapple with what Jesus would want our definition of ‘success’ to be.
I pray for these two elders and the new minister and their up and coming journey.
June 19th, 2005 at 9:12 pm
yappy little people like yourself?
June 21st, 2005 at 8:41 am
This Sunday is Jubilee Sunday (picking up some of the remnants of the Jubilee 2000 campaign). As I understand it, a successful church in the words of Jesus the Christ would be a people dedicated to the task of bringing good news to the poor, proclaiming release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, let the oppressed go free and proclaiming the year of the Lord’s favour.
I have struggled with the physical manifestations of such words, for myself and the congregation with whom I worship. But if we are to define ’success’ surely it would be in being faithful to a proclamation such as this?
June 21st, 2005 at 5:21 pm
Essentially that is what I said