All ministers desire success in ministry. We pray for it, read books about it, attend conferences discussing it, and listen to stories of people who seem to have attained it. But before we can get very far, we must first define it.
What is success in ministry? What does success in ministry look like?
Without an answer to this question, we will import definitions or pictures of success from other sources. We might adopt an expansionist view of success. In this view, success means being bigger and having more. This is an easy trap for ministries to fall into because almost everything else around us in the world defines success this way. Businesses are measured by increases in sales. A family is said to be living a good life if they have more income. At high school and college reunions, people evaluate each other’s lives by how much more they have achieved and accumulated. So it’s only natural for people to evaluate churches this way.
Get a group of ministers together and the conversation often reflects this mindset. People will often ask about numbers, “How many people do you have attending regularly?” Or a more polite and less obvious way is to ask about venues, “Where are you meeting now and how many services do you have?” Take the venue capacity, multiply by the number of services, and you’ll have the general attendance. Whether it’s outreaches, social media reach, or conferences, numbers play a big part in how we measure ministry success.
There is a place for looking at numbers in ministry. Each number represents a person, after all, and individuals are important to God. There are also Bible verses that talk about God’s people increasing in numbers.
But the problem with numbers comes when they become the measurement of success. This makes growth, production, and expansion the primary goal of ministry, instead of being a natural outcome. And an outcome that we might never be able to see in this life.
So if numbers aren’t the primary goal, what is? We see the answer from looking at the ministries of Jesus and the early church. The primary concern of Jesus and the early church was faithfulness. They wanted to be faithful with what they had received. They wanted to be faithful to the teachings of Jesus. They wanted to be faithful to the will of the Father.
In the same way, we submit that the Kingdom way of thinking about success in ministry is by pursuing faithfulness. More than pursuing being bigger or more, we want to be faithful. These two goals cannot be pursued simultaneously. One must be primary. Making one primary means if we have to choose between the two, we know which one we will choose every time. Too many ministers have chosen being bigger and having more over being faithful. Instead, if we say we are pursuing faithfulness, it will often mean forsaking short-term growth opportunities in order to remain faithful to God’s commands.
Here are some questions we can ask ourselves to help us keep faithfulness as the main thing:
- What has God entrusted to me? How am I faithfully stewarding these things?
- What does being faithful look like in this situation?
- Where am I feeling the pressure to be bigger or have more? How do I respond to these pressures?
- Am I submitting my work to God or am I working on autopilot? Am I relying on the Holy Spirit to produce the lasting spiritual fruit or am I relying on my own efforts?
