If you talk to most people who know me they will tell you that I am quite competitive. Be it at board games, football, or a pizza eating competition with my teenage sons at a Pizza Hut buffet. I guess most of us are competitive at something, be it competing against ourselves to beat that time, be fitter, read more books than last year, or competing against others at any or everything.
But our competitiveness is deeply damaging when it comes to ministry and I know because I've felt the need to compete. 'How big is your church now?' is the question that most people who have planted churches face most regularly in some form or another. It is spectacularly unhelpful. It sets up an us and them. The successful versus unsuccessful. It brings a weight of expectation which can become a burden. It plays to all our competitive and comparative instincts and mitigates against partnership and gracious honesty and mutual care and prayer. And it totally ignores the different socio-economic, planting strategies, team strengths, environmental factors, geographical and demographic quirks which have a huge influence on those things.
As I've mused on this issue it strikes me that our competitiveness creates its own problems. It seems to me to be a clever ploy of Satan to keep us driven or proud or disappointed and disparate rather than united. Here are a number of areas which are impacted by competitive ministry:
1. My kingdom focus not big kingdom focus
Read through Acts and look for competitive evangelism or church growth and you won't find it. Instead theirs is a whole kingdom focus that frees resources, generously gives, and graciously and joyfully celebrates growth everywhere. Yet too often we are focused on my church, my numbers, my mission field, comparing and contrasting it with others and then feeling either proud or crushed. This simply shouldn't be.
2. Competition negates rejoicing
Too often we see ministry growth elsewhere as a threat or as highlighting deficiencies in ours. That simply is not so. And such thinking means we will not grow beyond being stunted spiritual pygmies. It means the gospel has not really penetrated our hearts and is not likely to. It also means we may take an unhealthy joy, though we'd never show it, in another ministries struggles.
3. Keeping our slice of the pie
There is only so much funding for ministry so if we are competitive we will jealously guard what funding we have access to; looking to ring fence and protect, or grow our revenue streams using a business model. We will want to invest in our ministry, our church, gain funding for our initiatives, ignoring the fact that it may be at the expense of others. The Biblical model seems to be a bit different. Funding flows where the need is greatest not where the wealth is. So initially most mission is funded by the Jerusalem church. But when the Gentile churches are healthy and well established and there is a famine in Jerusalem they gentile churches generously send money back to Jerusalem. They don't want to keep their slice of the pie, they don't hoard resources because they are concerned for the kingdom and their brothers and sisters and so they give.
4. Hoarding not providing
I've done a whole blog post on this but this is another area where competitiveness causes gospel blockage. If we're competitive we will focus on growing our ministry and our staff team rather than on providing workers for the kingdom where ever they are needed. Instead ought we to be training up leaders and preparing them for service in other parts of God's kingdom, rather than training up to hoard. When was the last time your church trained up a leader you would love to have kept but deliberately sent on somewhere else to serve?
5. Competition creates isolation
Let me speak personally to pastors. Many pastors are lonely. Not in the sense of having no friends but in terms of creating expectations of themselves that are unhealthy and lead to isolation. Admittedly some of those are caused by unhealthy church cultures, but increasingly I think that is a tiny minority. Our competitiveness means we don't want to show the very people who could most help us our vulnerabilities be it because of the fragility of our ego, fear of how other pastors may judge me, or simply because of pride. How many other pastors are you really honest with about how you are doing? Not in terms of your church but in terms of our own personal walk with Jesus, our love for God, our pastoring of our families, our theological doubts?
There are lots more ways our competitiveness hinders our ministries. I'm pretty sure than behind many pastoral burn-outs and moral crash and burns lies an unhealthy, gospel denying competitiveness. I'm also sure it is behind much of the pastoral loneliness and isolation people feel. Only in applying the gospel and fighting our sinful pride saturated competitiveness will we know the joy of gospel partnership, love and kingdom growth. It's a battle that I am increasingly aware I must fight to avoid all those dangers listed above and many others.
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