After Christmas, my family and I visited Colorado where much of our family lives, and I had a couple of conversations that got my mind going a bit. One was with my brother-in-law, Jeff, and the other was with my sister, Katie.Jeff is a vice president of a company that launches satellites and takes really, really cool pictures from space. He's brilliant and is really good at his job.
Katie is a pediatrician (it's really handy, by the way, to have one in the family). She loves what she does and is also in a leadership position in her company (a large health care provider), helping to oversee several offices in addition to seeing patients.
I've always loved what I do (working with teenagers in a ministry setting), and I am quite thankful that I have a job that's not in the business world--it didn't really suit me the first time around. However, I was a bit jealous of them as they shared about what was going on in their jobs. I wasn't envious of what they do (although Jeff as a REALLY cool job). What I found myself longing for is that they can usually tell how they're doing in their job by looking at measurable, concrete outcomes.
Of course, I know it's not really that simple, and I'm looking at green grass from my side of the fence. But a part of me wishes that things were really that simple in ministry. Part of me wishes I had some widgets to sell. If I sell a lot, great job Benjer! If I don't sell that many, I have some work to do.
In ministry, it's tough to know at the end of the week how I'm doing. Am I on the right track? What areas do I need to work on? Where can our leadership team focus our resources and energy to make the biggest impact? How do I know that I'm being faithful to God in my leadership?
This is one of the difficulties of Christian leadership. How do we know if we're a good leader? Is it always by external, measurable results? I sure hope not. I recently had the opportunity to have dinner with a well-known youth and family pastor and author. He shared excitedly about some great changes his church had made in their strategy and philosophy of ministry--that had resulted in cutting their church attendance down to one-third of what it had been just before the change! Yet he knew the leadership had been faithful in their decision.
Sooner or later, we need to realize this truth: we don't make widgets, we love people. We love them by sharing about the love of our merciful God, both in word and in action. And at the end of the day, it's tough to put that on paper.
Of course, this doesn't mean that we should shy away from evaluating how things are going. But we have to realize that sometimes being a faithful leader will not always produce results. The problem is, this makes it hard to be a leader. There's a lot of self-doubt that can come with this kind of context. We become obsessed with statistics or how people think about us. We want to know how we're doing, but this can lead us to all sorts of ways of evaluating how our ministry or church is doing that have more to do with making us feel okay as a person than it does with how faithful to God we are in our leadership.
It's worth repeating: we don't make widgets, we love people.
There are certain things that we can evaluate: how we accomplish measurable goals, or how many new guests people are inviting. But at the heart of what we do is loving people in Jesus' name, by serving them and telling them about Jesus' work on the cross. And that's not always something we can measure. Is that sometimes discouraging? Yes. But if we focus on anything else, we will inevitably end up trying to please people rather than doing our best to glorify God.
