Was Jesus Numerically Challenged?

By Ray Hollenback

Ray Hollenbach, a Chicagoan, writes about faith and culture. He currently lives in central Kentucky, which is filled with faith and culture. You can check out his work at Students of Jesus.

A few days ago I stumbled across a sentence that absolutely captured my attention. It’s from the blog of a nationally-known evangelical pastor (I'm pretty sure you'd recognize his name).

The sentence is part of a longer blog post, and is not meant to stand entirely on its own, yet it set the stage for the rest of the post that celebrated what God had done in the past and the lessons the pastor had learned in the first 15 years of ministry. Near the very beginning of his post, he said:

“The fact that we’ve grown to over 12,000 people worshiping and serving each Sunday at 14 locations in four states is proof of God’s grace.”

 

I read the quote several times. It bounced around in my head, making noise like two random and unrelated piano keys struck at the same time. I couldn’t read the rest of the article. Instead, I pasted the sentence on to my Facebook and Twitter pages and asked my friends for their reactions. Here are a few samples:

• It sounds like a dangerous presumption.
• Yes, I do think it's by God's grace, but it sounds more like "12k people! 14 locations! 4 states! Ergo, I AM AWESOME!" Somebody's big fat ego peeked out behind what was probably a sincere attempt at giving God the glory, which is His alone. Darn.
• The fact that I run circles around everyone shows that God is good. WhatdoyathinkofmeNOW?
• Jesus only had a handful of people, no building, and no cash. How sad that by Western standards, he didn't do a great work.
• More needs to be known . . . The numbers might be good, and might not be.
• It sounds like a guy who wishes he could cage fight Jesus :)
• The proof of God's grace is what the 12,000 people are doing Monday through Saturday.
• Numbers alone are only proof of crowds gathering.
• That quote isn't universally true, but it may very well be true of their situation. Numbers alone don't tell the whole story.

My own thoughts were as varied as a bag of Skittles:

• I’ve never met the megachurch pastor quoted above, but I believe him to be sincere. I trust his motives even if I do not understand his methods. The religious world of Christianity is filled with its share of competition and jealousy—I’m sure this man has been criticized unfairly and been the envy of others. I also wonder how he can appeal to a numeric accounting of the grace of God.
• The Father isn’t against big numbers, because he loves the whole world, and that’s a pretty big number. On the day of Pentecost 3,000 were added to the church in a single day. That’s a pretty big number. John the Revelator looked into the heavens and saw the angelic host of heaven, “myriads of myriads, ten thousand times ten thousands.” According to my calculations that comes to, uh, give me a moment, uh . . . a pretty big number. God can count. He numbers the hairs on my head and calls the starry host into the night sky one by one. The biggest megachurch is yet to come, and I’ll be there without complaint.
• Yet Jesus went about changing the world in a remarkably small way. A short life, few followers, and a handful of seed at the end. The resurrected Lord tossed the seed into the ground and said, “I’m outa here.” He left 11 un-cultured leaders, perhaps 120 people, no budget, no map, and no plan except “make disciples and teach them to obey.” The only asset they possessed was an imperishable seed. Any worldly accounting considered Jesus a failure and the ragtag collection of followers no threat to Jewish society, much less the nations of the world. Only in hindsight do we see the wisdom and grace of God revealed.
• One of the largest churches in history was the Hagia Sophia, in Istanbul, Turkey. Built for the glory of God in the 5th century, it housed Christian worship for a thousand years—until it became a mosque for 500 years. Today it is a museum. I’m pretty sure it’s a parable that’s been told very slowly. Thirty years ago the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California welcomed 10,000 worshippers and more than two million viewers each week. This year it filed for bankruptcy—46 million dollars in debt.
• Jesus didn’t do arithmetic. He did the higher level math. He engaged in human alchemy and turned human beings into living stones. He built good foundations and let the centuries gently press down on his church. The church he built will never change hands. It’s the only church that will last.

Jesus is the model I want to follow. I want to be the seed that falls into the ground and finds good soil.

If I impact 30, 60, or a 100 people during my lifetime I’ll consider it a fruitful life.

Perhaps you have other reactions. What is your opinion? What kind of church is evidence of the grace of God?

The Dangerous Pursuit of Pastoral Fame

By Bob Hyatt

Bob Hyatt is is pastor of the Evergreen Community in Portland, Oregon, and a regular contributor to Out of Ur.



As my chiropractor was working me over yesterday, she was asking about the reading I’m doing for a degree I’m working on. After I rattled off the titles and subjects of a number of leadership books, she said, “Wow, what are you going to do when you are finished with school—rule the world?”

“Actually, I’m moving in the opposite direction,” I said.

And I am trying to mean that. Genuinely.

Over the last few years, I’ve thought long and hard about “my platform” as a pastor, a writer, an occasional speaker. And as I’ve done so, I’ve come to the conclusion that there is a danger to my soul in pursuing more exposure, more name recognition, more money to be made from thinking, writing, and speaking about ministry issues. Especially while I am still in full-time, paid ministry to a local community.

I want to be clear, though: I have no issue with writers/speakers who sell lots of books, go on speaking tours, and generally promote their works however they can. But there’s something very “off” in the proliferation of pastors who are mixing ministry in and to a local community with “building their brand.” I think a good case can be made that the self-promotion that’s inevitably needed to build a brand in today’s world in incongruous with the servant-leader model of pastoring and the attitude of humility that ought to accompany it.

The Celebrity Pastor certainly isn’t a new phenomenon. But the extent to which some take it today, I think, is. Yes, Spurgeon had his sermons published in the paper weekly. But can anyone really imagine him re-tweeting the fawning praises of his Twitter followers, or John Wesley selling tickets to his latest tour? Can anyone imagine Dwight Moody slapping his name on a couple ghostwritten books a year?

In other words, it seems as though we’ve thrown any reluctance over celebrity for our ministry endeavors out the window, and now many of us are now actively cultivating, pursuing, and—dare I say—grasping at the fame, increased money, and recognition that comes with hitting the big time in today’s ministry world.
And therein lies the danger and the challenge. Both for us personally and for the church as a whole.

When pastors start building their “platform,” growing their influence, and raising their profile, it’s generally talked about in terms of expanding ministry reach, being a good steward of the talents God has given, and, always, increasing “kingdom impact.” And while I have no doubt that many are humbly pursuing a God-given call to speak beyond the bounds of their local church community to a larger audience, I also suspect that for many, the motivations are somewhat more muddied, somewhat less altruistic.

For example, pastors who receive large salaries from their churches to produce sermons and resources for their community and then turn around and package and sell those same sermons and resources for personal profit need to rethink the model under which they are working. That kind of double dipping is not allowed in many other places in the world and probably shouldn’t be allowed in the church.

These last few years have seen a host of pastors and ministry leaders confronted with the challenges of a global audience and a personal brand. Some have done so with integrity, recognizing that their increased fame and recognition had become not only a danger to their own souls, but a hinderance to their church community, and they have wisely chosen to step out of one role so that they might more fully and faithfully pursue another.

Francis Chan is a great example. He took a lot of flack for leaving his mega-church pulpit. His motivation? Wanting “to go somewhere where he is unknown.” It’s a study in contrasts to watch Chan, who feels “led to greater obscurity” try to explain that to one of the more famous of today’s celebrity pastors.
How refreshing is it to hear someone in today’s world talk about pursuing obscurity?

The danger is not only to our own souls, that we would grasp after fame and abandon the quest for humility in our own lives. The danger is also that we would continue to hard-code the celebrity culture into our church communities. That we as a Church would continue to admire men and women not for their servant hearts but for their big audiences. That we see a day when every large and medium-sized “market” in America is served by the franchises of the five or six top video venue pastors . . . and we would like it.
We must begin to separate celebrity from pastoral work. Local church ministry should not be a stepping stone to anything, least of all to fame and fortune. It should not be easier for CNN to get in touch with a pastor than for someone in his own congregation.

For me, I knew I was in danger when the stats on my blog became important to me. I would post something and then check obsessively over the next few days to see how many had read it, linked to it, commented on it. The balance had shifted from “I want to say something about ministry/Jesus/the Gospel” to “I want to be known as someone with something to say.” And when that shift occurs, no matter how much we say the name “Jesus,” what we’re really pointing people to is “me.” Jesus has become the platform on which we stand, not the Savior to which we point.

So, how do you know you are moving into the danger zone here? Is it only big time ministry leaders who are affected by this? Not by a long shot. The truth is, the size or scope of your ministry is irrelevant. In fact, sometimes it’s those of us who have the smallest ministries who actually have the biggest longings.
Some signs you might be in danger:

You look at the speaker roster for a conference and think, Why did he/she get an invite and not me?
You feel jealous of others because of the size or scope of their ministry.

You begin to dream that somehow “hitting it big” (or even hitting it medium) will free you from ministry, or you begin to resent the small, mundane and unnoticed tasks of local church ministry.

You regularly Google yourself (please, no jokes in the comments.)

Your face appears on the front page of your church’s website.

You become a “friend collector” who racks up the Facebook/Twitter followers with the idea that someday, you’ll be able to leverage that when you write that book you’ve been talking about writing forever.
You find yourself thinking more and more about how you can get your name “out there.”

Please don’t think I’m condemning any pastor who has ever written a book or spoken at a conference. This is a very fuzzy area in which much grace needs to be extended. But if we never talk about the danger zone of self-promotion, we’re doing a disservice to ourselves and those we are called to serve. If we don’t think hard, on a personal level, about our need to be known by people beyond those we are directly in relationship with and service to, we run the risk of becoming men and women who use the people God has given us to serve as a means to our own self-gratifying and glorifying ends.

More and more, I’m trying to lean hard into the credo of John the Baptist: He must increase, and I must decrease. Maybe others can manage the trick of doing this while simultaneously “building their brand.” If so, God bless them. I just know that I can’t. And I’m betting not many of us can.

The Cycle of a Leader

By Bill Hybells



Bill Hybels talks about the characteristics of people he sees as leadership material.'




Bill Hybels is the founding and senior pastor of Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois, and the chairman of the board for the Willow Creek Association. Both visionary and passionate about seeing every local church reach its full God-given potential, he speaks around the world on strategic issues related to leadership, evangelism, and church growth. He's a best-selling author of more than 20 books, including The Power of a Whisper: Hearing God, Having the Guts to Respond.