Todd;
You’ve accomplished, again, a topic which has evoked both controversey and acceptance. Obviously we want what we do to be quality. Our whole calling is one which reflects the Master’s work in us.  But we don’t want what we do to be a show or a sham, only a cover-up of the emptiness of deep spiritual values.
I can’t add much to what has already been shared. And that is what makes us strong as the Body of Christ. We balance out the too left or too right of our thinking and fall somewhere with a balanced understanding of what God is calling us towards.
Obviously Jesus didn’t have to worry about worship teams, sound or power-point techs, church buildings, nurseries or worship Centers. He did one thing and did it well, gave his life or us!
If we give our lives to God first and to the mission of the call upon each of us, He will accomplish His goals.
Yes we get tired, sloppy and lazy at times. Some times mistakes are unavoidable and we will lose people because they happen to show up on the Sunday there was a big “foopa”. HOpefully the Kingdom is more than the perfection of details, and more about buildling relationships.
The world does a phenomenal job at producting quality productions. The church with even its best resources pales in comparison. But what we can offer with quality and sacrifical sincerety is loving relationships with those far away from God. We will continually strive to do our best, we should, and we should take into account what our congregations are seeing, hearing and observing. We need their evaluation and input, but we cannot afford to be under the judgement or criticism of consumer mentality, no matter how valid.  The two “spirits” are contrary - one is from a heart of correction, love for the Kingdom’s sake. The other is all about “me” and how it makes me look or feel.
Thanks Todd, you get a gold star.

John 3:36,

Thanks for giving me light on what I think.  I wasn’t sure what I thought until you told me.

Sorry, but your “Despite pleadings to the contrary, that is easily recognizable to those with eyes to see and ears to hear what God has said” line to me sounds pompous and elitist.  It almost sounds like you’re saying that I don’t have eyes or ears to interact with God.

If that’s the case, I guess I’ll just have to ask if I can borrow your eyes and ears until I get mine working.  After all, yours seem to supercede everyone what everyone else may be seeing or hearing.

Todd

I do not catch myself saying any of those things, but one statement we have to guard against around my church is; “Well, it didn’t hurt us.” This statement is the nail in the ministry coffin for us because it means we settled.  We settled for poor planning, for poor leadership, for poor impact. 

Those who say that we feed the consumeristic hunger of our culture by striving for excellence need to know that consumeristic hunger is not new.  It is something that Jesus dealt with too.  Many people wanted Jesus to do some kind of trick, or meet some kind of need.  Often in the crowd were people who started as consumers and ended up being healed and set free.  It is in the heart of man to want more and more, a church that understands this need/desire inside of people has a great open door for the Gospel. 

I am not satisfied with 82% satisfaction in my church or ministry unless I can honestly say I gave 100% effort and inspired 100% effort from people. 

Finally, and Todd, sorry for this Can-o-Worms.  In my experience, 25+ of ministry and over 40 in the faith, the most consumeristic churches I have ever been around between 50-200 people.  Many of these churches stay exactly how they are because of powerful consumers who will not let change or growth happen.

Tye,
I am part of a church that meets in a school once on Sundays and has small groups during the week. I struggle with making contact with people during the week and encouraging leaders to lead with grace and to make sure that there small groups are going in the right direction. It’s about follow-up and making sure everything is in place. I am the small group pastor but I also work a fulltime job during the week. It is hard to balance time with family, church and work. Does anyone else struggle with this while trying to make everything you do excellent and also not being so stressed for time.

John 3:36 writes “Unfortunately the whole issue you are “attempting to address” is the product of man-centered ideology”

I differ. I always go back to Hybel’s statement which I quoted above. “Excellence honors God and inspires people.” For instance, if your church has a preacher who is unprepared and therefore basically stinks at preaching… It will generally not grow. On the contrary it may shrink, because of that individual’s failure to do his best. If my music is excellent, people will notice, they might even come back because of it, and in the process of becoming part of our community of faith, they will find THEIR area of giftedness and begin giving in that area…

“Trickle-down spirituality” (I’m just kidding about that term...)

I think I see some nostrils beginning to flare.  I don’t think this was the intended purpose for the question proposed.  Just goes to prove none of us are 100% perfect...nor are the people we shepherd.

Tye,
Thanks for your input. I have come to the conclusion that I do need to delegate more. That may be my biggest struggle though because I want to do it to make sure it happens well. But I need to trust those I am in fellowship with.

Tye, just in case you hadn’t noticed, it’s John 3:36, not 3:16 (the former directly references God’s wrath, whereas the latter does not--I wonder if that’s why 3:36 likes it so much...).
Anyway, the biggest stumbling block for me was reading about the ‘customer satisfaction survey’.  It applied to McDonald’s rather than the church, but I felt like the two were too close together in the post.  As I reread it, I see that that wasn’t Todd’s intent.  Rather, as has been pointed out, the reference to Mickey D’s was an excuse to bring up the topic of how committed we are to excellence in the ministry we are called to.  Or in other words, pardon my French, let’s make sure we don’t half-ass what God wants us to do at 100%.
To this, I say a hearty AMEN.
The only qualification I should add is that I don’t think this means we should have church attenders fill out ‘satisfaction surveys’ and then adjust the church’s direction solely based on that feedback (which is how I originally took the post).  Thankfully, I don’t think this is what Todd is saying.
Cheers,
-Daniel-

Sorry about the premeture post…

First off, let me say that I am not a pastor or ministry leader.  I soon hope to be very involved in the Men’s Ministry at our church.  However, even though I am not a church leader I am a regular reader of MMI and have been for some time now.

I’m not sure what others are seeing (or reading) in what Todd’s initial questions were but I know it didn’t require much thought on my part to understand what Todd meant.

As a government contractor I constantly hear the phrase, “That’s good enough for government work.” It is understood that there isn’t a very high standard in place.  As an individual, I can only be responsible for the actions of one person - ME!  However, I am also responsible how I present my Lord to others.  If they see my service to Him as slovenly, then they also see Him requiring substandard performance.  For the most part this translates into people having an attitude of not needing to change because they are “good enough” as they are.

Our only responses to Todd’s questions should be, “Lord, where have I not done my best for You?  How do I serve you 100% in all areas of my life?  Help me to serve You as You desire, not what I think.”

Measuring, evaluating and gaining feedback CAN create in some people a consumer mindset, but so can preaching, or singing worship songs, or going to bible study, or . . .

Some of us are in vocational ministry as a second career.  I can tell you as one who came to this from the marketplace, failing to evaluate how well (or if) we are accomplish the call God gave us DRIVES ME CRAZY!!!

In the marketplace there is a built in mechanism that keeps business sharp . . . new customers and the bottom line.  Now don’t crucify me just yet.  I know that the mission of the church is not about a bottom line, but rather about making disciples, and these are spiritual elements which are indeed difficult to measure . . . but not impossible. 

In fact, in the church, we can keep the doors open and salaries paid year after year without ever attending to or evaluating our performance against mission (Matt 28).  The “consumers” who keep things running are those already “in” and so the opinions of outsiders become irrelevant.  This is why I resonate so much with the idea of being seeker sensitive.  It doesn’t mean we build everything around how a seeker would view what we do and say, but rather that we ask the right questions of the right people in order to insure that we are sensitive to those moving toward God but still investigating. 

In John Kotter’s book Leading Change, he lists several sources of complacency.  Top of the list is “a lack of sufficient performance feedback from EXTERNAL sources” [emphasis added].

Sometimes in order to know what we need to know in order to be effective in our kingdom assignments, I believe we need hard data.  This is what the folks at Micky D’s are doing.  And isn’t that what Jesus suggests in the telling of both versions of the parable of the talents?  The evidence of the steward’s faithfulness was numerical, measurable and evaluatable (is that a word?) growth in his investment.

And Peter, I think John 3:36 makes a good point, from his perspective this IS about God’s sovereignty and predestination.  If God has already determined who gets in and we have absolutely nothing to do with it, then any discussion about how to be innovative or more effective (like 95% of the discussion here) is, to him, man centered and an affront to God.  And so John 3:36, you are right that “despite [your] pleadings to the contrary, that is easily recognizable to those with eyes to see and ears to hear what God has said . . . ” most of us here still disagree with your theological views which inform your methodology, so don’t you think perhaps it’s time to shake our dust from your feet?

Wendi

John 3:36 - I appreciate the feedback. I was wrong. I tend to skim over details, and that’s why I keep detail oriented people around me. See, feedback is so valuable.

Todd - I think this poor definition of passing applies to families as well.  Thanks for putting this out there for us to think about.  I am going to connect this with how families are doing.

Here’s an example.  For years we produced a big event in the summer. It was very expensive and very labor intensive.  One year we began planning late, after Easter was late on the calendar.  At the first planning meeting someone had the audacity to ask “now why do we do this?” Our chorus response was “it’s a connecting event between us and unchurched folks in the community.” To which our brazen teammate responded, “has anyone noticed if unchurched people come and get connected?” We didn’t have any idea.  We realized that because we didn’t have mechanisms to track our effectiveness, we had become at the very least poor stewards (about $8000 in cost and several hundred labor hours, which took both volunteers and staff away from their regular ministry tasks).  Plus, there was a very good chance that the event accomplished nothing toward its intended goal or our overall mission.  So we canceled it that morning.

When we did, guess who complained?  The “churched” folks who had come to expect it every summer; a nice event for their family.  It turns out that (now hear this Bernie), it was our LACK of creating a mechanism for feedback and evaluation which had contributed to our people behaving like consumers. 

IMO, everything we do (no program should be “untouchable” as Jan describes) must regularly be run through a filter of questions:
· How does our doing of this thing enable us to reach, connect with and serve those still far from God?
· How does our doing of this enable us to equip, affirm and disciple those in our church family?
· And finally . . . what information do we need to gather in order to answer these questions?

And John 3:36, your response to me makes several of my points:
1. Yes, we must have fruitful faith, which is why we must evaluate and measure (as Jesus suggested in the parable of the talents).  Evaluation just enables us to be sure our faith is fruitful.
2. Your hyper-Calvinistic interpretation of scripture prevents you from conversing about anything with those of us who are more Armenian in our views and interpretations of scripture . . . . because everything Todd posts relates back to this for you and you feel compelled to correct our theology.  So again I ask, since your “pleadings” have proven to be so “unfruitful” why don’t you just shake our dust from your feet?

Wendi