Ministry Idols: Metrics

This is a guest post by Scott Bessenecker. He is the Associate Director of Mission for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. Each year he helps to mobilize thousands of students to domestic and international mission. He is author of various books including his new release Overturning Tables: Freeing Missions from the Christian-Industrial Complex

I’m not interested in growth, I’m interested in flourishing. And there’s a difference.

Growth has become the ministry altar upon which we have sacrificed seeking the flourishing of God’s kingdom and God’s justice. It is sometimes the only lens through which we understand ministry health, as if constant growth were the Holy Grail of ministry success. But in a living organism there is a word for unabated growth which does not contribute to flourishing, it’s called cancer.

The worship of increase is part of the uncritically adopted corporate mentality we have embraced in Protestant churches and missions. The only acceptable direction for numbers in our annual reports to go is up. Bigger budgets, larger staffs, more congregants and increased numbers of people served by our ministries – this is how we view seeking first God’s kingdom and righteousness.

The fascination with counting converts, congregants and “clientele” became prominent sometime around the second Great Awakening (1790-1840). By the turn of the twentieth century, ministry by the numbers was the modus operandi for Protestants. Japanese evangelist Kanzo Uchimura, who studied in the United States in the 1920s, said,

Americans must count in order to see or show its value. . . . To them big churches are successful churches. . . . To win the greatest number of converts with the least expense is their constant endeavor. Statistics is their way of showing success or failure in their religion as in their commerce and politics. Numbers, numbers, oh how they value numbers!

Protestantism and corporate capitalism were birthed together, twins emerging from the womb of the middle ages (I’ve written a more about this in chapter 2 of, Overturning Tables: Freeing Missions from the Christian Industrial-Complex). It is therefore not surprising that our measure of health is primarily focused upon budgets, attendance, or ministry size.

Some may cite the feeding of the 5,000 (Mark 6) and the conversion of the 3,000 (Acts 2) as biblical justification for counting. But in both cases, within just two chapters, we witness a radical drop in ministry productivity with only 4,000 fed in Mark 8 and 2,000 additional converts in Acts 4. Yet this does not spur alarm or reflection as to why such a precipitous drop in converts or people served. What is more, John the Baptist’s ministry dries up completely and at the end of his life, Jesus’ ministry has shrunk from the throngs present in his early preaching to just 120 at the end. I don’t see anywhere near the obsession with numbers in Christ or in the early church as we indulge today.

In the scriptures growth is often used to celebrate of the power of the Spirit not the prowess of the strategist. Growth as an indicator of health is unreliable. One church in my town experienced a massive growth spurt. This was not a sign of health but of illness. It turns out another church in town was collapsing in a messy split and many moved together to this other church. The Jesus People of the 70’s and the Promise Keepers of the 90s mushroomed into the thousands but have all but disappeared today. This is not to say these movements were not marked by the Spirit of God, just that measuring growth may not be the best way to understand kingdom health.

When John the Baptist asked Jesus if he were the real deal of whether he should wait for another, Jesus did not send an annual report emphasizing growth. He gave John signs of the kingdom – “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them” (Matthew 11:4-5). These prophetic signs were better indicators of the coming of God’s reign than the number of those baptized.

I’m not saying that growth tells us nothing. I’m saying that growth is different from flourishing, and flourishing is the more critical goal.

So if we are meant to participate in the flourishing of God’s kingdom (in the “original” Great Commission God’s first command to us was to “fill the earth,” which can also be translated “fulfill the earth,” or “satisfy the earth” – Gen. 1:28 suggests we were made to contribute to the flourishing of God’s creation), if Christ appointed us to bear “fruit that will last,” then what signs of the kingdom should we be looking for?

Our Own Spiritual Maturity: We must not take a utilitarian approach to Christian workers, using them in the sense of an employee whose value is solely in what they produce for the ministry. Advancing the spiritual maturity of our staff must be a key vision to our organizational purpose. We can only export what we grow domestically. Let us make the spiritual maturity of our workers a critical outcome.

Rhythms of Dormancy: Every healthy living thing experiences regular periods of rest and dormancy. I live in Wisconsin, an agricultural wonderland which appears to be an apocalyptic landscape of snow-covered death 4 months out of the year. Our ministries and workers must be afforded regular seasons of fallow. Times to slow expansion in order to achieve depth, healthy boundaries around our schedules and travel, regular sabbaticals for all staff – these are contributors to flourishing.

Make Disciples: Jesus commanded his followers not to “go and make converts,” but to “go and make disciples” (Matt. 28:19). Teaching someone to obey the things Jesus commanded – things like loving one’s enemies, abandoning the master of money for the master of God, blessing those who persecute us, giving to those in need … These things are the long road which advances slowly, often enjoying two steps forward and then stumbling one step backwards. Training someone to radically live the way of love and peace in a world that encourages hatred and war is a messy, imperfect journey, but one that is a better indicator of God’s reign than someone who raises a hand at an altar call or people who attend church on Sunday.

Growth is not all it is cracked up to be. It tempts the ego and leads many down a path of building ministry empires rather than God’s flourishing kingdom. The increase of Christ’s government and peace (Is. 9:7) defies the easy metrics of church attendance or ministry budgets. Weapons beat into agricultural implements, those with disabilities being healed, the poor receiving good news, and people growing in their likeness to Christ – these are the signs of the kingdom we ought to be looking for.