1. Achievement
Every leader leads while being in desperate personal need of the full resources of God’s grace. This inescapable reality must be a major influence on the way those in the leadership community see themselves, conduct themselves, and do the work to which God has called them. It’s not just the young pastor who needs grace or the struggling pastor or the fallen pastor; grace is the essential ingredient in the success of anyone’s ministry, any time, at any age, in any location, and in any type of ministry.
The next chapter will unpack what it means for a leadership community to function like the gospel community that it was designed by God to be. In this chapter I want to consider how the good thing—achievement—can become a bad thing for leadership because it has become a ruling thing. Now, I know that achievement is not only a wonderful thing; it is also a vital thing. Salvation is all about achievement. There would be no hope of forgiveness, of present help, or of a new heavens and a new earth if it weren’t for the unstoppable ambition of the Lord of lords to achieve what only he could achieve in extending his grace to his people and in redeeming and restoring his groaning world. But there is more.
God’s saving grace ignites in the hearts of all his children a radical shift in ambition. Where once our thoughts, desires, words, and actions were motivated and directed by our ambition to achieve our definition of personal happiness, by grace they are now shaped by our ambition for the kingdom of God to achieve all God has designed for it to achieve. Where once we were ambitious for what we want, we now are ambitious to do the will of God. Further, God calls us to be ambitious for the growth and expansion of his kingdom between the “already” of our conversions and the “not yet” of our home going. Human beings are achievers, meant to build and rebuild, to grow and expand, to uproot and to plant, to tear down and to build, to dream and to achieve dreams. But every ambition and every achievement must bow to the lordship and the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ.
So it must be noted that the rescue and redirection of the desire of our hearts concerning what we seek to achieve is a work in progress. I wish I could say that what always motivates me to do what I do and say what I say is a heartfelt ambition for the glory of God and the success of his kingdom, but it is not. I wish that the ways I spend my money and invest my time was always motivated by vertical ambition, but they aren’t. I wish I could say that God is always at the center of every ambition of the thoughts of my heart, but he is not. I wish I could say that I always want every achievement in my life to be a finger pointing to God’s existence and his glory, but I can’t. So it must be said that for me, and I’m sure for you, ambition is a spiritual battleground, and it must also be said that in the leadership community of the church, ambition for God’s glory and his kingdom easily and subtly morphs into something else.
What Glory: An Achievement Story
They were young and ambitious. They loved the gospel, and they loved their city. They really did want to achieve great things for God. They didn’t just want to be gospel sayers; they wanted to be doers as well. They believed that the transforming grace of Jesus had the power to transform every aspect of people’s lives and the communities in which they lived. They were determined to be big-kingdom achievers who God would use to rescue thousands of little-kingdom captives. They weren’t proud; they were confident in God’s presence, power, and promises. In their gatherings they preached a clear, well-applied gospel message and invited people into God-exalting worship. And they took the gospel to the streets, not only proclaiming grace but doing acts of mercy that directly addressed the particular groaning of their community. They worked hard, planned big, and trusted that God would produce results.
Of course, they revised and revised again their gospel achievement plan, but as they did, they began to see results. It was dribs and drabs at first, but before long people began coming to Christ, and community ministries were noticed and welcomed. Before long they outgrew both their building and their staff. They looked for a much bigger facility to better house what they wanted to achieve and hired people to make sure they accomplished their goals. No one on the inside would have noticed it, but a shift was taking place. Thankfulness to God for what he had done had begun to compete with pride in accomplishment. Less and less time was invested in fellowship and worship during leadership meetings, and more and more time was spent analyzing the stats and strategizing goals. Leaders progressively separated from the body of Christ and became less candid, approachable, and accountable.
Thousands attended across multiple campuses each Sunday, and millions of dollars were collected each year. The leadership community had become a very different culture from the humble, grace-based community they once had been. The elders no longer functioned as the pastors to the pastors or as the spiritual guides and counselors of the congregation. No, they functioned week in and week out like the corporate board of a religious institution. The only thing that distinguished their board meetings from the corporate board down the street was a short devotional and time of prayer before each meeting. The deacons were no longer a mercy ministry board but more like the church’s executive accountants and property managers. Growth and money now dominated their discussions and their vision.
Increasingly staff members were afraid of doing anything that would get in the way of corporate achievement. So few pastors and staff had the courage to confess to personal struggle or ministry failure. Staff that didn’t achieve or who questioned decisions or values were quickly let go. Much of the staff was discouraged and exhausted, but few would confess it. Burned-out pastors and staff members resigned with little desire to continue in ministry. No one seemed to ask how the church could be the church as described in the New Testament if the leadership no longer functioned as the gospel community that the church was redeemed to be.
None of this happened all at once, and little of it was self-conscious or intentional, but subtle changes had radically altered the culture, mentality, and values of the leadership community. It was all masked by the hungry crowds that still came and the many ministries that continued to grow. The church was no longer just a much bigger rendition of what it had been in its early days; it had progressively become something very different. At the heart level, leaders had changed, and before long, the changed leadership community would, in pride of achievement and unapproachability of spirit, destroy what God had so graciously built. Could it be, in your leadership community, that there are signs that the glory of achievement has begun to replace the glory of God as the most powerful motivator in the hearts of your leaders and of the way leadership plans, assesses, and does its work?
Gospel-oriented achievement is a beautiful thing, but the desire to achieve becomes dangerous when it rises to rule the hearts of the leadership community. Below are signs that indicate when achievement has become dangerous. Use these to evaluate your leadership community and for the purpose of honest leader self-examination.
1. Achievement becomes dangerous when it dominates the leadership community.
Let me begin by acknowledging that God has ordained us to do ministry where money is a needed concern, where there are necessary business aspects to what we do, where strategic planning is important, and where the numeric growth of the church requires more property, bigger buildings, a greater focus on facility maintenance, and a progressively growing community of employees to staff it all. None of these things are wrong or dangerous; they are necessities of a wise stewardship of a growing ministry. But these things must not become so dominant that they begin to change us and the way that we think about ourselves and the ministry to which we have been called. We cannot allow ourselves to migrate from being pastor and ministry leaders to being the corporate board of a religious enterprise. We cannot allow ourselves to move from being humble, approachable gospel servants to being rather proud and not-so-approachable institutional achievers.
Achievement plans for a local church are not necessarily enemies of humble gospel ministry, but as you experience ministry success and numeric growth, they are difficult to hold in proper balance. When humble, gospel-passionate pastors, preachers, and leaders over time morph into institutionally focused administrators or vision casters, they tend to lose some of their gospel passion, and the church or ministry suffers as a result. Yes, we should be ambitious for the expansion of God’s kingdom of glory and grace, but we must also recognize that as long as sin still resides in our hearts, achievement is a spiritual war zone that is not only littered with pastor or leader casualties but has reduced many who are still in ministry to the ranks of the walking wounded. Hear the cautions for us in the spiritual history of Israel, as they tasted the success and affluence of the promised land:
It was I who knew you in the wilderness,
in the land of drought;
but when they had grazed, they became full,
they were filled, and their heart was lifted up;
therefore they forgot me. (Hos. 13:5–6)
In your ministry community, has the quest for institutional achievement become dominant? Don’t answer too quickly.
2. Achievement becomes dangerous when it controls our definition of leaders.
The qualifications for ministry in the church of Jesus Christ are radically different from the way we typically think about the makeup of a true leader. I want to listen to what people in a church or ministry say after announcing that someone has real leadership qualities. I want to hear what they think those qualities are. Should people be ceded position, authority, or leadership in a ministry or church because they have been successful in ministry, because they have the drive to get a job done, because they have handled their finances well, because they are persuasive communicators, or because they have an impressive resume?
Consider, for a moment, the radical nature of the qualities that God says in 1 Timothy 3:2–7 make for a long-term, faithful ministry leader, the kind of leader every influential church or ministry needs:
I want to make two observations about long-term success in ministry. First, in a general sense, God wants pastors and leaders to be successful because he loves his kingdom and his bride, the church, but in God’s estimation, long-term faithfulness that produces fruit in ministry is rooted in humble, godly character. A second thing that this leader-quality list presses in on us is that ultimately God is the achiever; our calling is to be usable tools in his powerful hands. Because we are not sovereign over the situation in which we minister, because we have no power to change people’s hearts, because we are often in the way of instead of being part of what God is doing, and because we cannot predict the future, we have no ability on our own to achieve ministry growth or success. We are called to faithfulness of character—character, by the way, that only God can produce in us, and God is sovereign over the miracle of redeeming grace and the expansion of his kingdom. Where in your leadership community have you become more focused on doing than on being?
3. Achievement becomes dangerous when it forms our view of success and failure.
I am persuaded that when an achievement focus dominates a leadership community, it tends to have an erroneous definition of failure. Failure is not the inability to produce desired results. There are so many things in ministry in this fallen world, over which we will never have control, that influence outcomes. If hard, disciplined, faithful, well-planned, appropriately executed, and joyful ministry work does not guarantee results, then the lack of desired results should not define leadership failure. Remember Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 3:7: “Neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth.”
True failure is always a character issue. It is rooted in laziness, pride, lack of discipline, self-excusing, failure to plan well, lack of joy in labor, and failure to persevere during hardship. Failure is not first a matter of results; failure is always first a matter of the heart. It’s failure when I have not invested my God-given time, energy, and gifts in the work God has called me to do. Ministry laziness and unfaithfulness are failure.
If, however, a leadership community is too result- or achievement-focused, it will tend to disrespect a leader who hasn’t achieved desired outcomes even though he has been a faithful steward of the gifts and opportunities God has given him. Rather than reminding themselves once again that they are utterly dependent on God to grow the seeds that they have planted and watered, that leadership community will tend to think that they have put the wrong person in the job, will set that leader aside, and will look for someone else to do the task. I can’t tell you how many faithful pastors and leaders I have counseled who have come to think of themselves as failures because their work didn’t achieve what they and the community around them hoped it would achieve. In ministry, success and failure are not a matter of results but are defined by faithfulness. Faithfulness is what God asks of us; the rest is entirely up to his sovereignty and the power of his grace. How does your leadership community define failure, and how does that shape the way a leader is viewed whose work has not produced the desired results?
4. Achievement becomes dangerous when it silences honest leader communication.
Because of what God has done for us in the person and work of Jesus Christ, our leadership communities have been freed to be the most honest communities on earth. We are free to confess weakness because Jesus is our strength. We are free to confess failure because all of our failures have been covered by his blood. We are freed from taking credit for what only God can produce. We are free to respectfully disagree with one another because we get our identity and security from our Lord and not from one another. We are free to confess wrong attitudes toward and actions against one another because grace allows us to reconcile. We are freed from the allure of power and position because we have been freed from looking horizontally for what can only be found vertically. And we are free, because of Christ’s work, to talk about these things and confess how we struggle with them.
But in achievement-dominated leadership communities, that kind of honest talk tends to get silenced. It’s not silenced by the plan of any one person but by the values of the leadership community. In achievement-focused leadership communities, leaders tend to be afraid of confessing weakness or admitting failure. They tend to deny both to themselves and hide both from their fellow leaders. It has pained me to talk to leaders who are in regular contact with a leadership community but tell me that they have no one to talk to about their weaknesses or to confess their fear of ministry failure. It’s not that they have been ministering alone, but the functional values of their ministry community make it hard for them to think that they can be honest about their struggles and find understanding and grace.
Think with me about the danger of a ministry leader who feels he can’t be real with anyone. None of us is independently strong. All of us drag into our ministry a personal catalog of weaknesses, and we will until we’re on the other side. God offers us his enabling grace because we still need it. Denial of weakness is never a pathway to good things. We all fail somehow, someway every day. Often failure is the workroom God uses in our lives to reform us to be what we need to be in order to be more successful tools in his hands. And, by the way, we are commanded in Scripture to confess our faults to one another. I will say more about this in the next chapter.
Hiding, denial, and fear will keep a ministry community from spiritual health, and the lack of spiritual health will prohibit the ministry longevity that is a necessary ingredient in realizing long-term results. Do your leaders feel free to confess to personal weakness and failure, knowing that when they do, they will be greeted with grace?
5. Achievement becomes dangerous when it causes leaders to view disciples as consumers.
Here is the danger: in local church ministry it is much, much easier to build church stuff than it is to build people. Building facilities, multiplying ministries, and planning a yearly catalog of events are much more immediately satisfying and fulfilling than the long-term, often frustrating and discouraging work of leadership giving themselves to the gospel work of building a community of disciples of Jesus Christ. So it is tempting to define ministry by the church stuff that we have built, managed, and maintained rather than by the numbers of people who are in the process of having their lives turned inside out and upside down by the progressive work of transforming grace.
Yes, there are facilities that need to be designed and built, there are programs that need to be established and staffed, and there are events that need to be scheduled, but these things must not be viewed as the heart of the ministry work to which we have been called as a leadership community, and they must not dominate our ministry energy, efforts, conversations, and decisions, and they surely must not define the way we assess ministry success.
Our ministry passion and energies should be focused on doing everything we can to lead the people entrusted into our care into a deeper love for and service to Jesus so that everything we do serves this disciple-making purpose. When this central calling is replaced with institution building, potential disciples get turned into consumers. They tend to view the church as a location with a set of facilities and a catalog of events, and they shop for what they think will meet their needs or the needs of their family. The church is not a vital part of their lives, like an organ or a limb of one’s physical body. Instead, the church is just an event they attend, stepping out of their lives to do church stuff and then stepping back into their lives when the event is over. A disciple has no such separation in his thinking. For him, being part of the body of Christ is an identity that doesn’t just define a set of gatherings he attends but redefines everything in his life. Everything about him—his relationships, his work, his time, his money—is being transformed because he is part of the transformational community of disciples called “the church.”
This work is much, much harder and requires much more patience and grace than achieving facility and program goals, and the gospel tells us why. We have the power to build church stuff, but we have no power whatsoever to build people. When it comes to people building, we are completely dependent on transforming grace. The Savior is the people-building achiever who uses us as his tools but works in his own way and on his own time. What are you seeking to build and how will you know that you have achieved your goals? It really is true that ministry achievement becomes dangerous when it turns potential disciples into consumers. How has the way you have built the church and the way you think about your job as leaders influenced the way your congregation thinks about the church and their relationship to it?
6. Achievement becomes dangerous when it tempts us to see people as obstacles.
We can’t allow ourselves to be so intent on achieving great things for God that we develop negative attitudes toward the messy people of God who are intended to be the objects of the ministry to which we have been called. God knew that if he placed his church in a fallen world that it would be inefficient and a bit chaotic. But the mess of ministry is God’s mess, a mess that drives leaders beyond the borders of their own wisdom and strength to rely on the presence, power, and promises of the one who sent them.
I can’t resist repeating a story I’ve written about elsewhere, because it is such an example of this point. I was teaching a pastoral ministry class and telling my students stories of the messy and sometimes difficult people God called me to lead, when a student interrupted and said, “Okay, Professor Tripp, we know that we will have these projects in our church; tell us what to do with them so we can get back to the work of ministry.” In his view, these people were obstacles in the way of ministry rather than the focus of his ministry. Of course ministry is messy! The church is a community of unfinished people living in a broken world and still in need of God’s forgiving and transforming grace. The church isn’t meant, for either leaders or those being led, to be comfortable; it’s meant to be personally transformational.
It’s important as leaders not to lose sight of the fact that we have been called to people who are in need of fundamental heart and life change, while we confess that we, like them, are often in the way of what God is doing rather than being part of it. The church will never be a community of spiritually mature people if leaders are so busy achieving that they fail to treat immature people with patience and grace. Church leadership is a people-building ministry; to function any other way is both unbiblical and dangerous. Has the way that you have defined ministry negatively impacted the way you view, live with, and lead the unfinished people who are meant to be the recipients of that ministry?
7. Achievement becomes dangerous when it causes leaders to take credit for what they never could have produced on their own.
In church leadership it may be that achieving goals may be more spiritually dangerous than dealing with obstacles in the way of failure. When a leadership community seems to be on a run of success, with numbers increasing, ministries healthy and multiplying, and people growing, leaders are easily tempted to take credit for what only God, in his presence, power, and grace, could produce. This temptation brings to mind God’s warning to the children of Israel as they entered the promised land:
When the Lord your God brings you into the land that he swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give you—with great and good cities that you did not build, and houses full of all good things that you did not fill, and cisterns that you did not dig, and vineyards and olive trees that you did not plant—and when you eat and are full, then take care lest you forget the Lord, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. (Deut. 6:10–12)
If you take credit as a leader instead of assigning credit to the one who sent you and who alone produces fruit out of your labors, you will praise less, pray less, and plan more. Leadership communities are in trouble when they assign more power to their planning than to their prayer. When you take credit for what you could not have produced on your own, you assign to yourself wisdom, power, and righteousness that you don’t have. Then you begin to assess yourself as capable rather than needy, as strong rather than weak, and as self-sufficient rather than dependent. Your pride in achievement not only makes you a proud leader but also sucks the life out of your personal devotional communion with God and your fellowship with his people. Your devotional life gets kidnapped by preparation and planning, and you are less dependent on and open to the ministry of the body of Christ. Further, because your successes have made you feel worthy and entitled, you are tempted to grant yourself a lifestyle and luxuries that few of the people you have been called to serve will ever be able to have. (Please stop here for a moment and read Amos 6:1–6.)
Way too many leadership communities in the church of Jesus Christ are populated by leaders who, because of ministry success, have become unapproachable and controlling. It is sad when the proclaimers of God’s grace have come to feel less than dependent on God’s grace as they fulfill their ministry calling. God has used the weakness of my sickness-damaged body to reveal to me that much of what I thought was faith in Christ was not faith at all. It was pride in experience, pride in accomplishment, pride in physical strength and the ability to produce.
This is a temptation that every leadership community faces, particularly when God has granted that community success. There are two things that need to be observed here. First, God doesn’t call us to ministry leadership because we are able, but because he is. Second, as leaders we should not fear weakness, because God’s grace is sufficient. It’s our delusions of strength that we should fear because they will keep us from seeking and celebrating that very same grace.
8. Achievement is dangerous when it becomes the principal lens of leader self-evaluation.
Every human being is constantly doing self-diagnosis. We are always evaluating how we are doing. And we are always looking to some kind of standard to help us measure personal achievement. Those in leadership are no exception. Sometimes they evaluate formally, but most often they evaluate in ways that are subtle and unspoken. Leaders constantly revisit their track record, evaluate their present performance, and calculate their potential. None of this is wrong, and all of it is part of what it means to be a rational, productive human being. But achievement as the dominant measure of leadership is dangerously single-focused and imbalanced and gives a false view of the condition of those in a leadership community.
A life of long-term ministry productivity is always the result of the condition of the leader’s heart. Godly leaders, because of humility of heart combined with a robust faith in the power of God’s grace and the reliability of his promises, are able to weather the storms, defeats, and disappointments that are the inescapable experience of every leader’s life. Because of their humility they become increasingly thankful for, open to, and dependent on fellow leaders. And because of their acknowledgment of their need for God’s grace, they don’t take credit for what only God can bring about.
Yes, we should assess whether leaders are doing their jobs with discipline, faithfulness, and joy. And, yes, because we are passionate for the gospel and the extension of God’s kingdom, we should be on the mark, working to achieve. But we must not esteem doing over being. Think of the beloved leaders whose ministries imploded; almost never were these leaders set aside because they failed to achieve. Rather, in the lives of failed leader after failed leader, the failure was more a matter of character than productivity. Has leader productivity caused you to fail to ask questions about the deeper spiritual health of your leaders?
9. Achievement becomes dangerous when it tempts us to replace prayer with planning.
Perhaps every church leadership community should post James 5:1–18 as a constant reminder and warning. Fruit in ministry is the result not of our wise planning and diligent execution but of the loving operation of God’s rescuing and transforming grace. He produces the fruit; we are but tools in his redemptive hands. He calls us to himself, conscripts us for his work, produces commitment in our hearts, gives vision to our minds, empowers us to be faithful and disciplined, brings people under our care, softens their hearts to hear the gospel, produces conviction and faith in their hearts, empowers their obedience, transforms their lives, and calls them into his work.
Of course we should plan, of course we should work to be good stewards of the people and resources God entrusts to us, and of course we should continually evaluate how we are doing, but as we are giving much time and energy to these things, we must not let prayer become a perfunctory habit, attached to the beginning and ending of leadership gatherings. As I stated earlier, prayerlessness in a leadership community is always a result of putting credit where it is not due. Your leadership community is in trouble if your leaders are more excited about a strategic planning meeting than a prayer meeting.
A catalog of ministry achievements should make us even more prayerful, because we want to honor the one who has given success to our work, we want to continue to acknowledge that we cannot do what we’ve been called to do without enabling grace, and we need protection from the temptations that success brings. How esteemed are times of leadership prayer in your community? How often do you go away for a day or a weekend just to pray together? Have ministry experience and success made your community all the more dependent on the Lord? Do you have extended times of worship together? Do you at times meet for the sole purpose of “counting your blessings”? Does success produce worship of God in your community or self-congratulation? In your leadership community is planning central and prayer peripheral? Is your leadership community a thankful, humble, and needy praying community?
We should be hard workers, questing to achieve great things in God’s name. We should be leaders with an ever-expanding vision for the spread of the gospel of Jesus Christ. In every way possible we should be seeking God’s kingdom and his righteousness. We should make radical plans and take radical gospel action. We should never become achievement satisfied, because there is always more gospel work to do. But we must always remind one another that achievement is a spiritual minefield. Achievement has the power to change us—to change who we think we are and what we think we are capable of doing. Sadly, achievement can turn humble servant leaders into proud, controlling, and unapproachable mini-kings. But there is powerful, right-here, right-now grace for this struggle.
The one who called us goes with us. The one who called us will empower us. The one who called us will convict us. The one who called us will protect us. He opens the eyes of our hearts to dangers we would not see without him, but he does so not as our judge but as our Father and friend. May we approach him with confidence, with cries for help, with confession where we have wandered, and with a commitment to be good soldiers in this battle. And may we remember that he fights for us even when we don’t have the sense to fight for ourselves.