Gauging Success
October 17th, 2007
Rod Parsley, pastor of World Harvest Church in Columbus, Ohio, knocks one out of the park as he promotes his new book “Culturally Incorrect: How Clashing World views Affect Your Future”. His point is that far too many Christians have become so preoccupied with measuring success through numbers that we’ve lost sight of Christ’s true objective for the church.
“‘The problem is that we began to gauge success in the church world by how many people we had coming into a building on Sunday morning.’ And that, says Parsley, is often reflected in evangelistic focus. `We continually say, come — but Jesus never said, come. Jesus said, go.’Go into all the world.’ Be that salt, be that light.’”
You can read all about it here.
Goodbye Mr. Spalding! (That’s a little baseball lingo.) This is exactly what I’ve been saying for years. There’s nothing I hate more than for a believer (particularly a pastor) to ask me, “Did you
have a good Sunday?” Which is code for, “Did you have a lot of people there?” What difference does it make? I told one guy recently (a pastor), “Ya man, we had 25 people come forward and get saved today!”
“Really?”
“No, not really. I’m kidding.”
Here’s the deal. The Bible NEVER tells us to make our worship services appealing to the world so that the lost will come in and be saved. Jesus said, “Go.” Success is never measured by how many bodies we can pack into the pews. Success is measured by changed lives. And the last time I checked that’s still God’s job. We are merely the instruments that He chooses to use to accomplish His kingdom work.
According to the article Parsley says, “…it is a hallmark of the Christian faith to share Christ and to engage the culture.” Regarding his new book he says, “It flies in the face of much of the
post-modern … humanistic books that are being sold in Christian circles today. It’s not a self-help book; it’s a world-help book — how we can become the vessels of light that God intended us to be.”
Amen, brother! Preach it!