Pastoral Success: It's Not About Budgets, Butts, and Buildings

In Part 1 of this series (Climbing the Pastor's Ladder: Holy Ambition and Escaping the Comparison Trap), we looked at the ladder of pastoral advancement and the trap of comparing ourselves to our peers by the world's standards.

In the western world, our criteria of success are often set by the business world, in crude terms I learned early in my own career: budgets, butts, and buildings. But those aren't a good measure of true ministry success. Let's talk about why.

Success is About Goals: But Whose?

Well, obviously, the English word “success” isn’t in the Bible. It pops up in English for the first time in the 1500s, derived from the latin successus, “an advance, a coming up; a good result, happy outcome.” [1] Today, success is really a matter of things turning out for you, or, more basically, achieving one’s goal(s).

So, a successful pastor is one who achieves their goals. But which goals are the ones that matter? And whose goals matter? And what does real success look like? 

This isn’t just an abstract question. We want what we are doing to matter. If we aren’t successful, we can feel like we are just wasting our time. Goals (and achieving them) is a big part of our sense of purpose.

The Allure of Metrics: Sales, Revenue, and the Corporate Image of Success

In America, when people think of success, they conjure words and images related to business. A generation or two ago, success might have looked like Carnegie or Rockefeller. Today, it looks a little different (no top hats anymore), but success in business still looms large. And like Mickey Mouse and McDonalds, we’ve probably spread this idea around.

As such, we like metrics. Sales numbers, revenue, profit, net worth, etc. all are the measures of success in business. Bigger numbers=bigger success. After all, if the goal is to make lots of money and to keep doing it, then the balance sheet is the measure. You can look at the bottom row of the ledger and a big number in black means you’re successful. (Maybe this shouldn’t be how success is measured in business—maybe businesses should care a little more about the common good—but we’re talking about the cultural picture.)

Business is anything but stress-free. But at least it’s not so hard to tell if you’re succeeding or not. I was recently talking to an acquaintance who had transitioned from pastoral ministry to the business arena. He said he appreciated how much simpler it was: “I provide a service that you want, you pay me for that service.” Close the deal—success.

Here’s the problem: our thought leader/CEO/“disrupter”/Lord Jesus turned the numbers game on its head. The Good Shepherd will go looking for the lost sheep and leave the 99 behind (Lk 15:1-7). So, we’re going to get a pretty different picture of pastoral success if we look to Jesus.  

The Success Fantasy and the 3 B’s: Budgets, Butts, and Buildings

It’s so ingrained that we have to actively fight measuring success this way. Just under 25 years ago, Tony Campolo wrote The Success Fantasy. This is how he begins his book:

Success is a shining city, a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. We dream of it as children, we strive for it through our adult lives, and we suffer melancholy in old age if we have not reached it.

Success is the place of happiness. And the anxieties we suffer at the thought of not arriving there give us ulcers, heart attacks, and nervous disorders. If our reach exceeds our grasp, and we fail to achieve what we want, life seems meaningless and we feel emotionally dead.

Since failure is our unforgivable sin, we are willing to ignore all forms of deviance in people if they just achieve the success symbols which we worship. (emphasis added) [2]

Ouch. That last line stings as we watch over and over again as pastors with the largest pulpits, the biggest flocks, fall over and again. Why? Because we are willing to overlook character faults if a person has talent, or “giftedness” if you want to spiritualize it. 

How does Campolo define success?

What is success? The word means many things, but for the sake of our discussion, let us agree that in our culture, success means an individual has gained for himself one, if not all, of the following: wealth, power, and prestige. [2]

Wealth, power, and prestige… not very far from the three "B's”: “budgets,” “butts” (as in getting them in the seats or pews), and “buildings.” 

Now, most of us have heard this before and we do our best to deny that we take part in the same measurements. But if we are really honest with ourselves, we would have to admit that we are more likely than not to measure our success by the three "B's”. 

The Pastor as CEO: Why the Corporate Model Fails

I’ve already noted that business terms and concepts are so prevalent in American culture that they are the air we breathe. We pick it up by osmosis.

If we elevate capitalism to an ideal, it’s no surprise that religious organizations in that society, Christian or otherwise, absorb the values of the larger culture.

Just look at the incorporation of business practices to boost church attendance. In the last few decades, churches and Christian organizations have explicitly turned to the world of business for reimagining their leadership, employment, revenue, and marketing/publicity, to name a few things. The advent of the seeker-friendly megachurch that treats the worshiper like a customer is the result.

And there is another reason. It is easier. 

How many dollars were in the plates this week? How many butts in the pews? That’s easy. How well are we discipling our youth? How well are we addressing the spiritual and material needs of our community? That’s quite a bit harder.

A Bigger Vision

If the business vision isn't real biblical success—if it isn't real spiritual success—how do we measure pastoral success? How do we answer those nagging questions? Am I succeeding at being a pastor? Am I wasting my time? Is this worth it?

The answer is not simple. Is success fulfilling your goals? And then, do I have the right goals? Is success fulfilling your church’s goals? And then, what are those? (The goals of the lay leaders? The goals of the loudest members? The unstated goals of the larger congregation?) Is it fulfilling the goals of the role of pastor itself? But then, what are those? Historically, regionally, and denominationally, how we understand those vary. I still remember taking a class on Saint Augustine in seminary and being perplexed by the fact that much of his “pastoral duties” were adjudicating squabbles between church members. Was he a pastor or a small claims court judge?

And what about God’s goals? What did God call you to do? And how do you know if you’re doing it?

I’m going to explore this further in my next post in this series. What I’m saying at this point, though, is that pastoral success is not the same as business success. You’re not going to be able to point to a simple number and say “there, I did it.”

As much as churches have some similarities to businesses and that some business principles can assist our ministries, we should not confuse church for business: that's not what it is.

The goals are fundamentally different. The three “B's" aren’t going to cut it. The success of a church is going to be something more organic, like the flourishing of a tree. How do the leaves look? Is there fruit? How much is there? Is it good fruit? Is the tree strong (but not brittle)? How are the roots doing? Is the tree benefiting the environment around it? Does it draw up water and nutrients to share with other plants in the heat of the summer? Does it prevent erosion during spring floods? Can the birds nest in its branches and feed their young? 

There are just as many factors for evaluating the success of a church and of a pastor’s ministry. But we can tell if a tree is flourishing or not, even if it’s not a simple number on a balance sheet. And there are ways of checking to see if our ministry is successful or not. That’s where I want to go next in this series. How do we tell if we’re being successful? How do we tell where we should improve?

I think that, instead of turning to the world of business, we should pick a more organic image for success. The Bible itself loves to use the image of a tree (or other plant) as an image of flourishing. It uses similar images over and over (e.g., Psalm 1, Matthew 13:31-32, Mark 11:12-25, John 15).

But changing analogies only goes so far.

It's still right to ask: How do I tell if I'm being successful? How do I tell where I should improve? So, what are the fruit we should be looking to see?

Continue to the final post in this series, Faithfulness, Not Size: The Real Measures of Ministry Success.

References

[1] Online Etymological Dictionary

[2] Tony Campolo, The Success Fantasy (Victor Books, 1980), p.9.