If you’ve been in or around church for very long, you’ve heard things like, “If we just reach one, it’s all been worth it.” Or, “Jesus chose just 12 men, and they changed the world.”
It’s true that every single life matters. And small beginnings should never be despised. It’s also true that in D.L. Moody fashion, one life wholly devoted to God can change the world. No argument here.
But Jesus’ mission went well beyond 12 ordinary men. His circle was always growing. In the upper room there were 120, and then at Pentecost 3000 souls were saved from every nation, tongue, and tribe. And the apostle Paul, for example, wasn’t even numbered among any of those.
The Gospel mission never accommodates a scarcity mentality, but many pastors and leaders do.
The Gospel mission never accommodates a scarcity mentality, but many leaders do.
This comes out in at least four habits:
Small-Thinking
Our vision is only as big as our capacity. We see things through the lenses of our role and responsibilities, and we become the center of the story. It’s not the mission of making disciples that captures our attention, affection, and resources, but our church or organization’s prominence, usefulness, and relevance.
Metric-Moralizing
When our congregation or followers don’t respond well or resist in some way, we assume the problem is their lack of faithfulness. We view our efforts as righteous and people who don’t as unrighteous, incompetent, or ignorant.
Resource-Hoarding
What we possess is ours. Whether money, knowledge, experience, relationships, or influence, we see these things as leverage to get ahead rather than as a stewards of trust to help the mission move forward. So, we close our fists and build a fortress by feigning responsibility, when in fact we’re only masking insecurity.
Reputation-Building
We want to be trusted, and rightly so. We should be trustworthy. But when building our reputation is a primary motivator, we view the success of others as a threat. The other churches are seen as suspect. The other group is dangerous. The other leader has problems.
These habits not only rot the soul of the pastor or leader and turn them into a dangerous actor, but these habits derail the mission of God in a church or community.
Small-thinking kills collaboration because “no one can do it as well as I can.”
Metric-moralizing kills multiplication because we view failure as a moral problem of others rather than a systems or process problem of ours.
Resource-Hoarding kills acceleration of the mission by keeping our limited resources in a silo dispensing them only to provide what will help our small-thinking, metric-moralizing efforts.
Reputation-Building kills motivation as everyone soon finds out that it’s not actually about the greater mission of God, but that it’s about us. The few comply to our requests, but they are no longer passionate about the work.
The opportunity cost to our scarcity mentality is the wholeness of our neighbors. They don’t live in brokenness because they have no options. They live in brokenness because we withhold those options from them.
The opportunity cost to our scarcity mentality is the wholeness of our neighbors.
A New Way of Living and Leading
The solution is hard, but it’s not complicated. For pastors and leaders to mobilize the whole church into the mission of God, we must reverse engineer this scarcity mentality. We must decide that Jesus is the center of the story, and if we want to join Him, we must adopt a different way of living and leading.
We must decide that Jesus is the center of the story, and if we want to join Him, we must adopt a different way of living and leading.
Kingdom-thinking that sees other churches and other organizations as essential partners replaces small-thinking. Systems-building that scales Gospel impact and sends the Church into the community replaces metric-moralizing. Resource-sharing that equips and empowers others to be successful replaces resource-hoarding. And platform-building that creates space for other churches and organizations to work and win together replaces reputation-building.
Bringing more than a faithful few into the mission of Jesus is not only possible, it’s a command of Jesus that He has empowered by His Spirit.
PICTURE OF THE WEEK
Two local churches working together to pour their lives into public school students. This is where kingdom impact happens.
EVERYONE’S WILSON | THE EVERYONE’S WELCOME NETWORK
I’m the Executive Director of Everyone’s Wilson and The Everyone’s Welcome Network—a platform for Gospel transformation. Our mission is to unite the Church to engage the community, so everyone thrives. Very simply, we’re passionate about helping Jesus-loving people live like missionaries in their local community through prayer, service, evangelism, and collaboration.
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