At the beginning
of the fiscal year, or more likely prior, you set a series of targets to be met
or exceeded and, come year-end, you stack up the goals alongside the actual
results and … then you figure out how to fudge the numbers for the
shareholders.
Too honest. Sorry.
But somewhere
between the delivery of the actual numbers from the accounting department and
the creation of the largely-fictional version that ends up in the annual
report, the truth about the current state of your company is known, if only by
a small group of men gathered in a boardroom.
Success — or
horrible failure — is quantifiable.
Not really so in
the church, is it? Not the way we’d like.
Spiritual Metrics
But what are the
metrics used by the Lord? I think we have a hint in his assessment of the seven
churches in Revelation 2 and 3, don’t we?
Ephesus
The good: works, toil, endurance, hatred of evil and the “works of the
Nicolaitans”, testing of false apostles, consciousness of Christ in bearing
with persecution
The bad: abandonment of the love they had at first
Smyrna
The good: spiritual riches in physical poverty, faithfulness in suffering
Pergamum
The good: faithfulness in persecution
The bad: some in fellowship who held false doctrine
Thyatira
The good: increasing works, love, faith, service and patient endurance
The bad: tolerance of evil
Sardis
The good: a reputation for being “alive” and “a few people who have not soiled
your garments”
The bad: works without genuine spiritual life behind them
Philadelphia
The good: kept the Lord’s word and did not deny his name, patient endurance
The bad: little power
Laodicea
The bad: lukewarmness, self-deception
Things That Didn’t Get Assessed
Notice the Lord
didn’t say to any church, “You just weren’t tolerant enough” or “I wish
you’d accepted just a little more false doctrine in the name of being loving”.
Tolerance is the world’s metric, not the Head of the Church’s.
Here’s some other
things he didn’t say about the churches:
“I know your church website got more pageviews than last year”,
“I know a lot of
teenage feet trampled the floor of that new gym you built”,
“I know your
offering take was up 8% year-over-year”,
“I know you
knocked on every door in your neighbourhood with tracts this year”,
“I know that new
pastor of yours really gets people excited”,
“I know you
finally paid off your mortgage”, and ESPECIALLY not
“I know this year
you added 112 new members”.
“Yeah, sure,” some may say, “but they didn’t
HAVE all that stuff back then!”
Precisely.
Things That Did
All the things the
Lord didn’t assess about these churches are very quantifiable indeed; all the
things that would allow us to draw conclusions about the life of our church
that might be as wildly inaccurate as the conclusions the Christians at Sardis drew
about themselves. But even reputation is worthless if we are not “alive” by the
Lord’s standard of life.
All through his
assessments, the Lord Jesus refers to “works”. That’s all well and good, but
how can anyone (other than the Lord, of course) measure works? Sardis had “works”.
Laodicea had “works”. Yet their works were wrongly motivated and not animated
by the Holy Spirit. So sheer activity is no useful metric.
And how do you
measure love, faith or service? How do you assess spiritual riches, unless you
are spiritual yourself? How do you measure the incursion of false doctrine,
unless you have studied the scripture enough to be able to identify it?
It seems the
things that matter to the Lord are unquantifiable by accountants, boards,
committees or even the average believer. Only the Lord himself and perhaps some
of those used to walking with him very closely indeed are equipped to evaluate
the spiritual state of a church.
There will be no
pie charts comparing “Love in 2014” to “Love in 2015” at your church or mine.
Not Much to Measure
The prophet
Habakkuk lived in a time when there was not much good to measure. Judah would
soon be going into captivity as punishment for years of idolatry, injustice and
other sins. The few Jews left in the land were not likely to see much in the
way of the evidence of God’s blessing. And yet Habakkuk says:
“Though the fig tree should not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines,the produce of the olive fail and the fields yield no food,the flock be cut off from the fold and there be no herd in the stalls,yet I will rejoice in the Lord; I will take joy in the God of my salvation.”
Even in pretty bleak circumstances, the
individual believer may rejoice in the “God of my salvation”. Habakkuk could
not possibly imagine what God was about to do in Babylon through Daniel. The
truth that “the heavens rule” was about to be revealed to one of the greatest kings of one of the greatest
empires in human history, all because of (or perhaps despite) the failure of Judah and Israel. Furthermore, Judah was about to be cured of idolatry once and for all. This post on The Benefits of the Babylonian Captivity is instructive.
Measuring Rightly
Back to the church for a moment.
God’s work is not hindered by our inability to see it going on or to quantify it to our own satisfaction, nor can it be stopped or even slowed down by our failures. The stream of God’s blessing may well be diverted elsewhere if we refuse to do the things that merit it, but we can no more stop God working by our incompetence or selfishness than we can drain the ocean with a cup.
Back to the church for a moment.
God’s work is not hindered by our inability to see it going on or to quantify it to our own satisfaction, nor can it be stopped or even slowed down by our failures. The stream of God’s blessing may well be diverted elsewhere if we refuse to do the things that merit it, but we can no more stop God working by our incompetence or selfishness than we can drain the ocean with a cup.
Further, there are a few measuring tools
available to us. We cannot generate numbers from them or fill spreadsheets with
data, but they may give us an idea whether we are on the right track. If we are
growing in love as we should be, our love will be characterized by, among
other things:
Try putting that in your annual report.
I would like to see a church’s annual meeting report contain those categories…
ReplyDelete…and then say at the end, “...in addition to which, we had some programs and spent some money. Now, let us pray…”