It's not a competition but...

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.

Walking with rather than talking at

I often want to be able to solve a problem quickly.  That's fine when it comes to DIY or even a simple admin job, but it is awful, destructive, and sinful when applied to people.  Part of the problem I think is absorbed from our culture of the quick fix, the instant remedy.  Part of it comes from wanting to remove pain and discomfort from the lives of those I care about.  Another part of it comes from wanting to be thought well of, wanting to be 'successful' in pastoring people, maybe even having something to dow with measurable goals or feeling like a job is finished.  And yet the Bible does not give us a steady stream of pat answers to life's problems and pains.  The Bible is not ordered or indexed or searchable in a way that enables us to look up 'd' for depression, 'a' for anxiety, or 's' for solution and we ought to be grateful for that.  Rather what we see is people walking with others through the story of their lives.

Quick answers, half thought through theology, hastily spoken misapplied doctrine is dangerous.  Just think of Job's friends.  They begin well, they sit and observe Job in silence but the problem comes when they speak and provide answers that are half thought through, received tradition misapplied to Job and his situation.  It would have been better if they had kept silent.  Or think of Nehemiah, he hears of a problem, he cares deeply about a problem, he is moved to help and literally moved to care for God's people, but he takes time to pray it through.  Even when he goes to Jerusalem he takes time to survey the walls and the people and live alongside them as he leads them to build first the walls and then a community with God at the centre within the walls.

There is a lot for us to learn from the Bible's walking with rather than talking at approach.  Think of the difference walking with gospel hope alongside a friend struggling with depression and anxiety would make rather than taking at them with quick answers about a situation we have not experienced or whose complexities and pain we don to fully understand.  Think of the difference walking with would make in any given situation of suffering you or those in your church family are facing; childlessness, infertility, loss, grief, unemployment, infirmity, disability and so on.  That is what Jesus did when he became man, he walked with us through suffering, he wept alongside Martha and Mary, he loved and lost and yet brought hope, it's no accident that we find him in the next chapter in their home again.  He walked with them and talked of hope and salvation as he walked.

Offering quick advice is easier but it is not more productive.  Walking with is longer term, it is harder work, it takes more commitment, and is more painful but it is what we are called to because it is what Jesus has done for us.

The pain of pastoral ministry

There is a difference between being thick skinned and just being uncaring.  There is a difference between being tender hearted and just being soft.  My hunch is that we are all prone to one or the other of those two.  Either we tend to be quickly devastated by any criticism or we have developed a tough carapace that means nothing gets to us at all.

Pastoral ministry is tough, it is painful, it is at times heartbreaking and it was designed to be such.  If we think we are doing pastoral ministry without ever experiencing such pain then I think we need to ask if something has gone wrong somewhere.  Both Paul and Peter call believers to be tender hearted towards one another.  Church is a family therefore when someone leaves or when there is disagreement there is going to be pain.

I wonder sometimes if this is magnified by the way the church promises so much but under delivers this side of eternity.  Or at least it does the way we think of it because we have an over realised ecclesiology.  I'm not down on church, I'm just wondering sometimes if we expect too much of it.  Church is a God's means of displaying his glory which he has staked on the gospel to the world and beyond in ways that we cannot imagine or fathom (Ephesians 3:10).  But at the same time Paul writes to two churches calling them to "bearing with one another" (Colossians v13, Ephesians 4v2), and Peter writes to a church calling them to "Above all, keep loving one another earnestly, since love covers a multitude of sins." (1 Peter 4v8).  Paul has to write to the Corinthian church about significant breaches in gospel living, he has to warn two ladies in Philippi, he writes to Philemon about Onesimus.  In each and every case we see the imperfections of the church.

And yet so often as believers we are surprised at the imperfections we find in the church.  We react as if a brother or sister in Christ who is fighting sin is a failure, and as if the imperfect church is beneath us.  We are all a work in progress, God's Spirit working in us to realise grace, conquer sin, produce holiness and joy.  Yet too often we are impatient with that work in others, and such impatience spills over into judgement of others.  Too often we are quick to look outward rather than inward, quick to cast the first stone rather than examine ourselves.  The glory of the church is in the application of the grace of the gospel again and again and again.

My Ideal Church

As a pastor I sometimes find myself daydreaming about my ideal church.  A church where suffering and sin don't have such a profound impact everyday.  Where when the phone goes it isn't news of a loss, a bereavement, a miscarriage, a marriage breakup or breakdown.  Where the families of those I am privileged to care for are not continually being ravaged by suffering.  Where no-one drifts but everyone is pressing on for the prize and engaged in evangelism out of an overflow of love for Christ.  Where we are all united around the primary issues and lovingly bear with one other on secondary issues where we differ.  Where there is no such thing as friendly fire.  Where people don't drift or grow cold or hard to the gospel.

As I've been thinking about it I think some of that is good.  Some of that longing is a desire for Christ to come again and for his church to be perfected and secure in his kingdom come.  Some of that desire is because we hate to see people we care about suffer.  Some of it is because we long to see people grow in their appreciation of and love for the gospel.

But some of it reveals an idolatry in myself.  A desire for a church that is easy to pastor, for people who don't need so much care and love, a longing for comfort and ease.  A longing to be liked and respected and valued.  Maybe mixed in there is also a bit of reputation idolatry - if church was like that what would it say about my ministry?  What would others conclude?

The reality is that ministry in a broken world will always be reflective of life in a broken world.  Sin impacts the church and those who are in it.  But I am reminded again and again in God's word that Christ is enough, enough for life, enough for loss, enough for ministry in the midst of each and everyone one of those.  Each loss needs to drive me away from self reliance - upon my skills, my experience, my ability to love - and to Christ who will supply all my needs.  Each criticism is to wean me from pride and remind me that I am to labour for his well done not peoples.  Each division is to drive me to pray that by the Holy Spirit God opens eyes and ignites hearts again to the wonder of the gospel of his Son.