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Be all that you can be!

// January 25th, 2009 // church, church relevance, leadership

I just caught up with back-posts from the Swerve blog and was reminded of something that we as pastors do that really sucks! Pastor Craig Groeschel posted here about a rebuke that more in church leadership should heed.

Why do we fall victim to the “look at how we do things right here” syndrome at the expense of making other churches/pastors look less than worthy of people’s attendance/respect/tithe/support? Pastor Craig cites three examples of this in his post:

Pastor One: “We never water down our message. We don’t preach a seeker sensitive message.”

Pastor Two: “How many of you have been to boring, dead, traditional churches? Churches like that shouldn’t even exist! I’ve got some news for you! We’re not your grandma’s church!”

Pastor Three: “We don’t preach topical-feel-good, entertainment sermons at this church. Most churches are into tickling ears and making people feel good about themselves, but that’s not us!

Pastor Groeschel’s response: “Who cares what you’re not?! Be who you are without making others look like they are less.”

My response: Be all that you can be! Just not at the expense of downplaying what others are doing.

I had a bit of a shock early last year. I was preaching a message that shared the vision for our mother church’s congregation. It was that we never want to accept money and use it to build a campus. Instead, we want to minimize our capital expenditures and use the budget to help lift up others in the community so that they may come to know the love of Christ through our random acts of kindness. I talked about how everytime I drove past a multi-million dollar church campus in town that I thought about how that money could have been used to help provide food or shelter for some hurting people. It seemed like a waste of precious resources. I had invited a friend to attend that day to help critique my preaching style. Rather than speaking about my style, he immediately criticized me for talking negatively about the other churches in town with big buildings and said I should focus more on what we are doing as a church and why we are doing it. Not what other churches were doing and why they shouldn’t. I was so busted!

Ever since that day I have intentionally tried my hardest to ask the Lord to not let me say anything like that again. God will use all sorts of works for his honor and glory and we are not in such a confident place where we can be the judge of other ministries in such a context (Something about seeing a speck in your eye and not realizing at huge plank in my eye comes to mind right about now.).

Craig Groeschel says, “Who cares what you’re not?” and I say, “Be all that you can be!” Let us not focus on trying to show why our vision and use of kingdom resources is better than another church’s. We’re all in this together, all running the same race, all looking to the kingdom prize at the end. Brothers & sisters, let’s build up and stop tearing down!