Missional Street Cred
May 27th, 2008
It’s interesting who they let speak at pastor’s conferences these days. Regardless of your denomination, I dare say you won’t find very many pastors of small unheralded congregations being invited as the keynote speaker at their national convention. Only the brightest and the best are afforded that honor, men with real credibility when it comes to being “missional” (We don’t need no manifesto!). So the question is, what qualifies someone as a bona fide expert in evangelism. Michael Spencer has a few suggestions:
There are three kinds of credibility that evangelicals should examine very closely these days. Those are the credibility that comes from your web presence, your conference presence and your ability to get published. These three things do not mean you know what you are doing on the ground, that you have any cred when it comes to building missional community or that anyone should listen to you. They don’t mean you are telling the truth or should even be speaking. They mean you have a platform. That’s it. Beyond that, someone should look deeper.
Having a church is another claim that should be taken with a grain of salt. Some gurus have churches so big, multiplying in so many ways that they could claim to be making converts by the kind of toilet paper they are using in their facilities and it would have cred. Hundreds and thousands of Christians coming to your church so they get to say they go to the “cool” church should give you no cred at all as being missional.
It’s unfortunate how much emphasis we place on human endeavor when it comes to the credibility of a man’s pastoral ministry. Those who demonstrate an identifiable and quantifiable measure of success are deemed credible to tell others how they can be missional. But as Spencer explains:
I really don’t see any value in telling someone else how to be missional with anything other than a lot of humility. It would be arrogant for me to say that the converts are anything other than the work of the Holy Spirit, since nothing we do has any spiritual power apart from God himself.
The apostle Paul wrote. “But God forbid that I should boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ…” (Galatians 6:14). Last time I checked the work of the Lord is still being done by the Lord. We don’t save souls. We are merely the instruments God chooses to use. That’s it. We’re just along for the ride. The only credibility that anyone might have is in giving testimony to the great things that God has done. How ‘bout a conference speaker that can do that?
May 29th, 2008 at 1:11 pm
Thanks for alerting me to Michael’s excellent piece. Actually, in recent years, we’ve had some smaller-church pastors speaking at our national conference; that represents a (very welcome!) change, though. We allow our American infatuation with numbers to influence our Christian faith to such an unhealthy degree. Look at the annual list of “America’s largest” or “America’s fastest-growing” churches, and you’ll find a compendium of everything from the faithful to the heretical to all shades in-between. Sometimes, faithfulness to Jesus will bring in greater numbers of people; sometimes, faithfulness to Jesus will cost us some people. But I, for one, am pretty sick-and-tired of this plastic evangelicalism that puts a statistical measurement on everything as though we can gauge things by nickels and noses.