Seth Godin wrote something this week that I think is totally true.
Successful people fail often, and, worth noting, learn more from that failure than everyone else.
I have the opportunity to work with a ton of really healthy churches… and  I can tell you that this is a value in each and everyone one of them.
Every one of them fails.
And every one of them learns from their failures so that they can do better next time.
If you look at failure as a negative in your ministry, you probably won’t fail much.
And if you don’t fail much, you probably won’t get much right either.
This ‘reaching people’ stuff is important stuff. Â We need to be willing to stick our necks out there, risk a little, and see what works. Â If we don’t, we’re destined to only more of the same.
Thoughts?
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Right on Todd. Appreciate you bro!
If you zoom in close enough to a stone or zoom out far enough from a mountain the two objects become quite similar. Their rocky crevices and jagged contours share many of the same characteristics; it is only the scale which differs. It could also be said a mountain is just a really large stone, or you could think of the mountain as being composed of many small parts all basically miniature versions of the larger whole. Sadly in the church we are seeing the same phenomenon; the life of the church is tending to reflect the life of the individual believers.
What is the definition of failure? How do we measure success? Do we define ourselves and measure church health by some percentage of hitting goals and missing pitfalls?
Many Christians have so assimilated to culture they now define success primarily on worldly standards: how big is my house, how many cars do I have, how prestigious is my job, how much money do I have, do I live in the right neighborhood, do I wear the right clothes, do I consume enough entertainment, do I have enough social clout, what do others think of me, how stable is my retirement account, are my kids going to the right school, am I physically attractive, how good is my sex life, etc. None of these goals are in and of themselves bad, they just aren’t primary. No matter how well you do in any of these areas, success will never add up to being a whole person.
If Christians are the smaller stones, extrapolate this problem to the life of the church, the metaphorical mountain. Churches can fall into the trap of measuring their success by how they answer questions based on a worldly view of success, many borrowed or adapted from corporate America: how big is my church building, how many pastors do we have, how big are our ministries, how fat is our budget, how attractive is our “brand†image, do we draw the right crowd, do we get asked to host the big Christian events, do our preachers have book deals, are other churches copying our methods, how many hits does our website get, does our worship band know how to rock, are we cutting edge, are we growing in numbers, are we retaining newcomers, etc. Again, none of these in and of themselves are essentially bad things, they just aren’t primary.
As Christians and churches we measure success by one standard: how well do we glorify God. Shouldn’t our evaluation questions be more along the lines of: Do we make King Jesus smile? Are we passionate about loving and serving our Lord? Do we have His heart?
When we as Christians value our success based off of how well we do a checklist we become religious prudes. We are the Pharisee, finding our value in proudly keeping moral standards. We think we are successes because we are “good†ethical people.
When we as Churches value our success off of worldly checklist we become spiritually dry religious institutions, attracting Pharisees and repelling the weak and broken hearted. We give off a false sense of success with a shallow veneer of authenticity.
This side of heaven every endeavor we undertake is going to be a mishmash of successes and failures. We will always fall short of perfection, God’s standard. We will sadly never get it absolutely right, our goals will never be grand enough and our abilities will never be naturally adequate. Oh but we can have God’s heart, and he has promised to give us his mind. We can know the joy of sharing in the glory of His kingdom work and the bittersweet pains of suffering for righteous pursuits.
God has promised himself to us, best of all we get God! There is our success. Missing Him is the definition of true failure. Unless you have the right vision, all your goals obtained or missed will be failures.