One of the first questions I was asked when the issue of reorganizing our ministry surfaced was this: How do you assess your own performance as a pastor? At first, I took offense at it because the obvious implication was that we’re closing up shop because I failed the church (and that will probably be the official bi-line for the rest of the organization). So my response was – that’s neither here nor there. Regardless of my performance as a pastor, the fact is that we are in this situation right now where we need to find someone who can give more time and focus to the ministry. And since there are no resources from our ‘denomination’ to draw from, the logical solution was to seek resources from others within the larger Christian community whom we trust. And this is why we sought the assistance of WIN.
There was actually another option – quit and leave the problem up to the organization (who couldn’t fix it anyway). But I chose to stay and find a solution because we remain committed to the people in our community.
But reflecting on that question over the next couple of weeks caused me to reflect on a few more things about life. At first, I admitted to myself that I must have failed as a pastor. After all, pastors take care of their congregations and all pastors grow their churches into large numbers and all pastors multiply their congregations and do church planting…right? Apparently not. Every pastor has his/her journey towards where God wants them to take the people they’ve been entrusted with. If being successful as a pastor means you grow your numbers and multiply your presence in the area over a specific period of time – then yes, I failed (but so has every other pastor in our organization over the past 3 years). Yet many pastors have been successful in doing it. Compared to them, I’m a failure. But if pastoring means creating a community and educating them about the Word of God, causing them to be aware of His work in their lives and especially in society, creating in them an excitement about that work and getting them involved in it – then maybe we’ve experienced some success. We can’t really play the numbers game because there is no objective way to measure cost versus benefit and no way to objectively factor in all that could have been done or should have been done because once again, there is no objective way to factor in where we should have been.
I’ve realized that how we measure success is ultimately a whole lot different than how God does. Is there even a measuring that goes on? It seems like all these performance measures (numbers, finances, saturation, leadership succession, etc) are all part of the same methodologies that churches have been copying from corporate America. In this environment, ministry is measured against results, not against an individual’s heart. Growth is measured against population, not against an individual’s attitudes and effectiveness is measured against biblical literacy - and we all know how inaccurate that is. Our local community may be small and we’re like a ragtag group of bandits making a small dent in the overall work of the Kingdom of God. But in the grand scheme of things, everything is being orchestrated by the Spirit of God – so even as we ministers measure our successes against each other (so we can claim who’s doing a better job than the other), God simply looks at each individual’s heart to see if that person did what they could. He takes care of how big or how small the impact will be (again, if there is such a thing).
So the question still remains. Did I succeed as a pastor over the past 3 years? And the answer is - only God can knows...
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