who are you?

From Rob Bell's counselor, when Rob was breaking down from being the "successful pastor", trying to always be everything to everyone:


"You're job is the relentless pursuit of who God made you to be. Anything else is sin."


Who are you?

great is thy effectiveness?

Something's wrong. We pastors are the stewards, the spokespeople, the advocates of a message of hope, life, and peace. And yet so few of us seem to be experiencing these qualities in our own lives. Something's wrong. In a world saturated with fear, insecurity, and stress, we are to show a different way. And yet those at the center of the church are burning out and leaving ministry at a rate of 1,500 per month. If that's what's occurring at the heart of the church, why would anyone on the fringe want to move in closer?

That's the opening paragraph of an article at Christianity Today I just read that discusses the bigger is better myth that still holds so much weight in the Western Church. Some other quotes from the article:

It seems too many of us have our identities wrapped up in the measurable outcomes of our work rather than in the life-giving love of the Christ we proclaim. Something's wrong.
...

Some might say these leaders have failed to nurture their souls sufficiently. We usually want to blame leaders for their own burn out, but when I see the pervasiveness of this problem I wonder if there isn't also a systemic factor. Could contemporary church ministry itself be the problem?
...

Consider a chapter titled "Bigger is Better" from a popular ministry book. The authors write, "A church should always be bigger than it was. It should be constantly growing." Talk about pressure. The problem is this standard doesn’t hold water when applied to Jesus himself. John 6 describes the scene where "many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him."
...

Unlike contemporary business, ministry involves the baffling interplay of the human and the divine, the spiritual and the material. There is a mystery to what we are called to do. Embracing this mystery and releasing the outcomes of our work to God is what we must do if our lives, and not just our ministries, are to be filled with his grace.

I encourage you to read it for yourself. I know this is nothing new for some of you, but I also know there are a lot of voices still shouting for growth and numbers and performance and results, and those voices will go out of their way to silence anyone who doesn't repeat their words. I hope this is an encouragement for those left in the dust of a fast moving "ministry". May you instead walk in the dust of your rabbi.