Dear Friends,
Recently I was listening to a podcasted sermon from College Wesleyan Church out of Marion, Indiana. In the sermon was a quote from the civil rights leader and founder of the Christian Community Development Association, Dr. John Perkins. In the quote, Dr. Perkins challenges how we define a successful church. With a little help from Google, I was able to find the original context of the quote and I share the context here to challenge each of us:
“How do you measure the success of a church?” This penetrating question was posed by Dr. John Perkins . . . Little did I know that this seemingly innocuous question would lead me on a journey that would forever change my life.
I was a pastor’s kid, and it seemed in the moment that a response should be coming to me more quickly than it was. Yet I could not find a cogent answer that seemed complete enough.
Dr. Perkins continued to poke at us. He began to list potential answers to his question. “Is success determined by your Sunday service attendance?” This was always the first item on a pastor’s resume, yet we were pretty sure this was not the answer. “How about the size of the church budget? Maybe success should be measured by how many staff the church employs? Maybe success is determined by how many periodicals write stories on your church. How do you measure the success of a church?
When he was satisfied with the uneasiness in the room, he finally offered his own perspective on what the answer should be. “The success of a local church should be directly tied to the degree that it holistically transforms its immediate neighborhood. Any other success factor is secondary?”
Bill Hybels is known for the saying, “The local church is the hope of the world.” All too often, however, our definitions of success have very little to do with hope for the world but are instead measurements of the size of our own kingdoms. We measure success in the local church by how big of a building we have, how nice the building looks, how great the preaching is, how many people are sitting in the chairs (no successful church could have pews), and how much money is in the offering plate. But what if success is really none of these? What if success is measured not in the size of our kingdom but in the impact of the Kingdom of God in our neighborhoods? What would that change in the ways we do ministry?
Stephen
The quote comes from the book:
Fuder, John, and Noel Castellanos. A heart for the community : new models for urban and suburban ministry. Chicago, IL: Moody Publishers, 2013