 |
| (Ladybug, in my home office) |
Dallas Willard's interview on measuring spiritual growth among Jesus-followers is prophetic
and subversive (the two often go together!). Many churches, he says, measure
the wrong things, "like attendance and giving, but we should be
looking at more fundamental things like anger, contempt, honesty, and the
degree to which people are under the thumb of their lusts."
Why don't churches
measure spiritual effectiveness by these things? Because these qualities are
"not worth bragging about." "We'd rather focus on
institutional measures of success."
People in today's
American churches are suffering, especially pastors and their families, because
"much of North America and Europe has bought into a version of
Christianity that does not include life in the kingdom of God as a disciple of
Jesus Christ. They are trying to work a system that doesn't work. Without
transformation within the church, pastors are the ones who get beat up. That is
why there is a constant flood of them out of the pastorate. But they are not
the only ones. New people are entering the church, but a lot are also leaving.
Disappointed Christians fill the landscape because we've not taken discipleship
seriously."
Churches, and
Jesus-followers, must change their definition of "success."
"They need to have a vision of success rooted in spiritual terms, determined by the vitality of a pastor's own spiritual life and his capacity to pass that on to others. When pastors don't have rich spiritual lives with Christ, they become victimized by other models of success—models conveyed to them by their training, by their experience in the church, or just by our culture. They begin to think their job is managing a set of ministry activities and success is about getting more people to engage those activities. Pastors, and those they lead, need to be set free from that belief."
