This past Sunday, Steve Childers preached at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, MN – the home of John Piper. You can download the sermon by clicking the link below.
Please pray for Steve this week as he works with Bethlehem to train their church planters.
“If I must boast, I will boast of the things that show my weakness.” 2 Corinthians 11:30 (ESV)
This is the fifth in a series of blog posts called, “My Top Ten Mistakes in Ministry (That I Can Share Publicly.)” After many years of ministry experience as a church planter, pastor and seminary professor, I think I’ve finally learned that one of the best kept secrets to surviving well in the ministry is to stop making the same old mistakes that others (like me) have been making for decades. Instead, let’s all start making some brand new, bold, innovative and creative mistakes!
We began this series with an introduction called, “Ladies First” in which veteran church planter wife, Shari Thomas, addressed the tough topic, What I Wish I Had Known About Church Planting from the perspective of the church planter’s/pastor’s spouse. We then took a look at:
This time we’ll take a brief look at another common mistake church leaders make that I wish someone had told me about before I went into the ministry.
Mistake #4: Not Understanding the Difference Between Pursing the Grace of God and the God of Grace.
John Piper’s words still seem to be ringing in my ears after all these years: “Is God a means of grace in your life and ministry or is grace a means to God?” No one had ever asked me that kind of question before. In fact, it took me a while to even figure out what the question meant.
But when I finally understood it, I found myself wishing someone had dared to ask me that kind of penetrating, potentially life-changing question many years ago. Let me try to expound on this idea briefly.
The Ultimate Quest of Your Life & Ministry
In John 17:3 Jesus said, “And this is eternal life, that they may know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent.” Here we are meant to learn that God’s goal for our lives is not merely to serve him in faithful ministry but primarily to know him, to love him, to glorify him and enjoy him.
Think of this question again: “Is God made a means to grace in your ministry or is grace made a means to God?” To put the question differently, “Does the quest of your life and the passion of your ministry terminate on God? Knowing Him? Enjoying Him? Glorifying Him?
Or is God brought in beside all your planning, techniques and ministry strategies in hope that he might somehow be the means of a great outpouring of grace on your ministry and in your life? The big idea here is that it makes a tremendous difference whether the ultimate quest of your life and ministry is the grace of God or the God of grace.
Using God to Solve Your Problems or Using Your Problems to Find God?
One of the most fundamental questions is whether you will place God or yourself at the center of your ministry. The practical benefits of a God-centered focus in life and ministry are far-reaching. Author Larry Crabb makes the point that a leader with this perspective stops trying to “use God to solve his problems”. Instead such a leader learns how to “use his problems to find God”.
A very common problem among church planters, missionaries, and pastors, is that we begin to see ourselves primarily as servants of God or soldiers of God. Unknowingly, over time, our view of God becomes primarily that of a Master or a Commander-in-Chief. And those pictures of God are biblical and true, but there is so much more to a truly biblical view of God.
In John 15 Jesus said, “You are my friends.” There is a sense in which that’s richer than merely being a slave or a soldier. Then in 1John 3:1 we read these astonishing words, “See how great a love the Father has bestowed upon us, that we should be called children of God.”
Stop and think about this: more than being a “friend” of Christ, because you are now “in Christ” you are also considered by God to be His child—one who is now loved with the highest of all loves, a love previously reserved by the eternal Father for His one and only Son! There is no stronger love in all the cosmos (Eph 3:14-20).
In Ephesians 5 we see another graphic picture of a bride and a bridegroom—the picture of intimate lovers. As a church leader never allow the imagery of what has been called the “John 3:16 of the Old Testament” to leave your mind and heart: “The LORD your God is in your midst, a victorious warrior. He will exult over you with joy. He will be quiet in His love. He will rejoice over you with shouts of joy” (Zeph 3:17). Here we have the Commander-in-Chief (the Victorious Warrior) rejoicing over you as His child with shouts of joy.
The Lord is our Commander-in-Chief, and we are called to be “good soldiers of Jesus Christ”, putting on and utilizing all the spiritual armor (Eph. 6) that is now ours in Christ. He is also our Master and we are called to be His “servants” availing ourselves of all of His means of grace so we might be called “faithful” at the end of this race. But we must never forget He is also our Friend, our Father and our Lover (and so much more).
The reason having a proper view of God is so critically important in your life and ministry is because it is so easy to be unknowingly:
In other words, if you are not consciously fighting against it, you are at risk of falling prey to pursing the grace of God and not the God of grace.
Just before his death, Dr. Bill Bright, the founder of Campus Crusade spoke at Reformed Seminary in Orlando, Florida, where I’m on faculty (along with Steve Brown). He had a terminal respiratory disease. Many of us were told he might not live long enough to speak in chapel on the date he had been scheduled. So I’ll never forget watching this man of God being helped into the seminary chapel in a wheel chair with a oxygen tubes hooked under his nose. Here was without question one of the greatest visionary leaders of our generation. And he had come to preach to us as “a dying man to dying men”.
I found fascinating that the focus of his final message that morning was not on the importance of capturing a vision for reaching the world for Christ. That’s what I was expecting. But it was, to my surprise, a powerful message on the importance of capturing a vision for God in the fullness of all His attributes.
I’ll never forget Dr. Bright’s final challenge to us that day—to see God not merely as useful but instead to learn to see God primarily as beautiful. It was just another way of saying, “Don’t merely pursue the grace of God. Pursue the God of grace”. I hope this helps you in that life-long process.
Steve Childers is the President & CEO of Global Church Advancement, an inter-denominational ministry that provides church planting training, consultations, and resources for church planters, pastors and missionaries throughout the world. Steve has trained Christian leaders from more than 50 countries (curriculum in five major global languages), representing over 200 denominations and mission agencies in 5 continents (& 5 languages). Steve is also an author, Professor of Practical Theology (since 1995) and the Director of the Doctoral program at Reformed Theological Seminary, in Orlando, Florida, where he teaches church planting, missions, evangelism and spiritual formation. To learn more about GCA:
With all of the practical advice our trainers had to offer at the conference sessions, it would be easy to be overwhelmed. Each trainer went over enough material to fill a full-week conference on its own, and they did it in about ninety minutes! Suffice it to say, if you were here with us this week, your task of learning and applying all of the material has only begun. That’s why it’s important to keep in mind what Steve Childers shared at the closing session. It’s important to remember “The Main Thing.”
In the book Liberating Ministry from the Success Syndrome, R. Kent and Barbara Hughes share how they had to reorient their understanding of success before they were happy in the ministry. Nobody wants to be a failure. But the point here is that success ought to be measured according to the proper criteria. Church planters are as prone as anyone else to measuring their effectiveness against unhealthy, counter-productive, and even dangerous benchmarks. If your top goal as a church planter is to grow your church beyond 200 people – or even 50 – then you ought to be taking a step back and asking yourself why growth is important to you. Statistics can be helpful in gauging the health of your church. But real success ought to be measured according to God’s Word.
For example, look at what Jesus tells his disciples in Matthew 25:14-30 (“The Parable of the Talents”). Even though one servant is trust with much and another with little, in the end they are each equally blessed. Why? Because each servant was faithful with what the master had given him. Likewise with church planters. The size of our churches are not indicative of our level of success. Rather, according to Steve, we are successful in ministry by “faithfully pleasing God with the resources and responsibilities he has given [us].”
Another source of trouble in the ministry can be all of the unexpected things that creep up and demand our time. If we’re not careful we’ll find more and more of our days spent dealing with things according to their level of urgency and regardless of whether they align with our ministry vision.
The root of the problem here is that we all tend to deal first with the things that are right in front of us (urgent). Instead of blindly following this approach, we should be mindful of our goals and do the things that serve them. This won’t mean always saying no to urgent matters that come up. But it does suggest that not all urgent matters are important. Distinguishing these two factors allows us to more effectively prioritize our schedules. Freeing ourselves from the tyranny of the urgent allows us to accept that our time is limited and that we cannot do everything that is asked of us. Instead, you should focus on the things that are important.
The Main Thing
Once we have liberated ourselves from both the success syndrome and the tyranny of the urgent, we can more clearly consider who we serve and what He is asking of us. Remember that it is God Himself – not church planters – who is building His church. Our work, then, should be done in the kind of faith that allows us to trust Him. This doesn’t mean we give up considering our vision, our Ministry Focus Group, or even our financial situation. But it means that we trust God with those things and do our work in the faith that He is sovereign and controls the outcome.
Practically speaking, Steve suggests five things to help us “make the main thing the main thing”:
So what is “The Main Thing.” It’s not the ministry. The main thing is loving both God and people.
WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT THE JULY 09 GCA CHURCH PLANTER TRAINING SEMINAR:
WHAT PEOPLE ARE TWEETING ABOUT THE JULY 09 GCA CHURCH PLANTER TRAINING SEMINAR:
WHAT PEOPLE ARE BLOGGING ABOUT THE JULY 09 GCA CHURCH PLANTER TRAINING SEMINAR:
Sharing a Contextualized Philosophy of Ministry:
http://churchplanting.sojournchurch.com/church-planting/sharing-a-contextualized-philosophy-of-ministry-gospel-church-and-culture/
Staying Healthy as a Church Planter:
http://churchplanting.sojournchurch.com/church-planting/staying-healthy-as-a-church-planter/
Piper, John. Spectacular Sins.Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2008. 121 pp. $15.99. Listen to the Spectacular Sins sermon series at Desiring God.
Book Review by Terry Delaney at Going To Seminary
Have you ever picked up a book thinking it was going to be about one thing and it turns out you were completely wrong? Spectacular Sins and Their Global Purpose in the Glory of Christ is one of those books. I thought it would be a testimony about how God has glorified His Son through men like Hitler and Stalin. I figured it would be about how God can use the major sins in your life to bring glory to His Son.
I was wrong. Instead, John Piper sounds an alarm to all Christians that a time is coming when it will no longer be safe to be a Christian. He claims that Christians in the West are being “coddled” and therefore we need to prepare ourselves for the trials and tribulations that are sure to come. In calling Christians to a preparedness for these tribulations, Piper seeks to answer the question “Why does God even allow evil?”
Using Colossians 1:16 as a springboard, he gives us his answer. In short it is all for Christ’s glory. Piper showed that God allowed such spectacular sins as the rebellion of Satan, the fall of Adam, the tower of Babel, Joseph, the demand for a king by the Israelites and the betrayal of Judas Iscariot to take place in order that Christ may receive more glory. In essence, if Col. 1:16 is true, then we must live our lives—trials and all—in light of this biblical truth.
I found this book extremely hard to put down. I was enraptured by what Piper had to say. It seemed as though all throughout the book he was building to a crescendo only to see the book just end. It is only then that you realize that the crescendo is your living out the biblical truths presented in Spectacular Sins.
This book is a must read for all Christians. I must agree that there is a time coming when being a Christian will be not only frowned upon but will hazardous to your wellbeing. We need to be reminded that even all the evil and sin that takes place is ultimately for Christ’s glory and we have something far better waiting on the other side of death than what this world has to offer—if you are found in Christ.”
Steve Childers & Darrin Patrick Endorsements:
“I wish I could have read this book as a new Christian as I was unprepared to face calamity because of my deficient view of God’s sovereignty. I am delighted now as a young pastor to be able to hand my congregation this book that will enable them to see and worship God in their suffering.”
Darrin Patrick
Pastor of The Journey, St. Louis
“Don’t let the small size of this book fool you. Like most of Piper’s writings—it’s wonderfully dangerous and critically needed in our day—especially in the Western world. This is a stick of gospel dynamite that has the potential of radically altering the way you view suffering and evil forever–on both a personal and global scale. But I must warn you. Don’t expect to find in this book all the typical, soft “words of comfort” espoused by many in our day to help people maximize pleasure by minimizing or rationalizing away the pain of suffering.
Instead prepare yourself to have your mind renewed by the deep, weighty truths of God’s word, your faith strengthened by a renewed vision of God’s supremacy in all things (including evil) and your courage bolstered in the face of the inevitable suffering that lies ahead to follow hard by faith after the One whose death was the most spectacular sin—for the sake of the nations and the glory of God. Only this can bring you the true comfort of God in the face of suffering and evil. I highly recommend it!”
Dr. Steven L. Childers
President & CEO, Global Church Advancement
Professor of Practical Theology, Reformed Theological Seminary-Orlando