Unlearning Success

I grew up at Heritage Wesleyan Church. When I was a small kid… the church ran in low 100’s. By the time I was in high school, the church had grown to a very solid 300. By the time I was a freshman in college they had grown to 500. And as a sophomore in college, just one year later, they were regularly breaking 1,000 people in the Sunday morning worship attendance. As of right now, they are running about 2,800.

While Heritage isn’t a perfect church, (what church is?) God has certainly poured out His Spirit upon that congregation. People are coming to Christ through the ministries of that church; people are being set free from spiritual oppression; people are being educated about having a world view and a missions mindset; people are genuinely worshipping and growing in their walk with the Lord.

I am proud to say that I grew up in that church. I have hundreds of fond memories which I’m sure I’ll take time to recount in another post. I am proud of and look up to the lead pastor there, John Bray. My father is a staff pastor there and my mother has worked there as an administrative assistant for years. I love going back to visit. I love seeing what they are doing. I love stealing their good ideas.

That said, I sometimes wonder if having grown up in Heritage has created an unrealistic expectation in me. I have been a full time staff member at two churches and I have worked at two or three others on a part time basis. I have been conditioned since my high school years to think that if a church isn’t growing, it isn’t successful. Nobody at Heritage came out and said that… but since I observed growth… I naturally fell into that mind set.

When I went to Kalamazoo, I went with high expectations. The youth program there was in pretty good shape, though disorganized. There was a good base of kids to work with… and with visions of Heritage dancing in my head, I figured that growing a large youth group would be easy. Not so with me. If anything, attendance slightly declined in my first year… and drastically declined my second and third years there. It wasn’t until my fourth year that I sort of ‘figured it out’ and I experienced my highest attendance while at Kalamazoo. Even then, it wasn’t explosive growth.

Again, when I went to St. Peters, I really thought we were on the verge of a sustained growth pattern. I went in with these dreams that we’d be running 300 in a couple of years. It has not happened and I’ll be honest… because I have been conditioned to think a certain way… my first instinct is to despair… and my second instinct is to question my call… because in my paradigm of success, there wasn’t much room for a pastor that can organize a good event, lead worship, and help the body become better rooted in Christ… all that mattered to me was that the church grew.

All this has been difficult for me to balance. Questions like: Am I a bad pastor because no church that I have been involved with in a full time capacity has ever really grown… and no ministry that I’ve been in charge of has just exploded off the map? Can I be a successful pastor, even if I never pastor in a large church? I know the answers to these questions. I really, really do. But in the midst of unlearning a paradigm… sometimes my mind can still play tricks on me…

As Yoda once said: “You must unlearn what you have learned.”

For the record, here’s what I’m NOT saying:

• I’m not saying that large churches are bad.
• I’m not saying that the goal of growing our churches is bad.
• I’m not saying that we should stop reaching people for Christ.

All I’m suggesting is that my definition of success might need some tweaking…