Faithfulness, Not Size: The Real Measures of Ministry Success

Success is a Long Obedience, Not a Quick Climb

Let me start with this: I am predisposed to believing that the ideal church size is relatively small.  Eugene Peterson has often been quoted as saying he didn’t think churches over 500 should even exist. He did say that, though in fairness that number was quite spontaneous—pulled out of thin air, not statistical research. But Eugene was a pastor of people, and he knew that a pastor could only know and serve a finite number of people before the church moved toward being predominantly an organization, at which point it would follow that a pastor was a CEO.

Secondly, let me also say I have long abhorred the ecclesiastical ladder. You know the one: pastors start at small churches or as youth pastors, and each succeeding call climbs to a larger and larger congregation, and that is “success.”  

Professional ambition is never a good look for a pastor. It seems to me that moves ought to be about genuine discernment and leading, not getting a bigger position. As usual, the Church has often followed the lead of corporate America in this regard, whereby bigger-is-clearly-better and success means getting at least another rung or two off the ground.  It’s this move to climb that Wendell Berry objected to, wondering why,

in the more than fifty years that I have known my own rural community, many student ministers have been "called" to serve in its churches, but not one has ever been "called’" to stay. ("God and Country," 1988)

Success in ministry is not a quick climb, it’s a long obedience—and whichever way God calls us to go is the right direction.

Following the Call, Not the Crowds

In 2010, I found myself having a very surprising phone conversation with the aforementioned Eugene Peterson. By that time in my life, he had become a valued friend and mentor. In fact, I never fully understood whether he was a friend who became a mentor, or a mentor who became a friend–a delightful confusion.  I was driving from Seattle to Spokane for a conference, and a deadline was looming on whether I would accept a call to pastor Hollywood Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles.  Hollywood Pres, of course, had a huge legacy footprint amongst evangelical Presbyterians as a flagship megachurch before people even used that term. However, the church had experienced an extremely difficult decade that was well-publicized, and in 2010 it had about 750 people. We had never imagined leaving our Seattle church for any reason, let alone for a bigger church in a bigger city, and my discernment anxiety over whether this was God’s call was high. And Eugene had asked enough questions that I could tell he was a little skeptical.

I pulled into a rest area off I-90 and called him in Montana. He and I had already discussed the Hollywood possibility, but it was crunch time now. Yes or no?  Eugene answered the phone as though he had expected my call. His gravelly voice said,

Dan, I’ve been praying for you this week.

Really?

Yes. I have to confess, at first I was praying and I was a little mad and I said “God, those people in Hollywood have nurtured an atmosphere of celebrity for the last 50 years... just make them leave my friend Dan alone!” 

But then, in a slightly amused voice, he continued.

This morning my prayers changed. I remembered that the Church belongs to Jesus and not to me.

In the end, we accepted the call. Eugene even came and preached the installation service, and we and had a very rich decade in Los Angeles.

I understood Eugene’s initial concerns.  Oh, the Hollywood celebrity part for sure, that was always anathema to him. He needn’t have worried about me in that regard. Status was never a big motivator for me, nor was rubbing elbows with it. But despite receiving each pastoral call with the expectation they would be long-term, despite being fiercely resistant to bigger-is-better when it applied to churches, despite checking and re-checking my motives... I had served as Associate in Minneapolis to 150 people, then Senior Pastor in Seattle for 500 people, and now Hollywood with 750. From the outside, at least, the trajectory of my ministry life still seemed connected to that infernal ladder. 

And then, in 2019, once again quite unexpectedly, we heard a call to Santa Rosa in Northern California to pastor The Cove, a faith community of about 100.  It didn’t make a lot of sense, but none of our moves have. I received a lot of surprised responses from friends and colleagues wondering what on earth was going on.  Had Hollywood gotten to me? Had LA proved too much? Was there a scandal? The questions came because people just knew that downsizing must mean something was wrong. Everything seemed to be going so well, didn’t I want to build on that success? Well, I did. We moved to Northern California.

There’s that word again. Success. I’m not sure it’s even a helpful word for ministry. Several friends and authors have proffered “faithfulness” as a better term, though admittedly notoriously difficult to measure. But if we must use “success” for pastoral work, what does it look like?   

Spiritual Metrics of Success: The Marks of a Flourishing Ministry

Here’s a few things I’ve been musing about:

• Success as a pastor means pointing people to Jesus.  The 17^th century Quaker George Fox was once asked about his remarkable lifetime of ministry.  He summed it up and said simply, “I took people to Jesus…and left them there.”  He just felt that his job was to get people into the vicinity of Jesus, into the presence of Jesus and things would happen. I guess it’s a little like the friends of the paralyzed man in Luke 5, lowering him from the roof until he was “right in front of Jesus.”

• Success as a pastor means helping people learn to pray, read scripture, and live and die as Christians.  That seems like a terribly long way from visionary leadership and ten-year strategies and building projects and attendance figures, doesn’t it?   Prayer, scripture, living a faith-filled life, confidence that death is not the end. If those things are happening in the lives of people around me, I feel like I’m fulfilling my calling.

• Success as a pastor means learning to discern God’s voice, and then follow it so others can do it too.  There are a million voices in our day, non-stop talking and opinions at every turn. Now it’s even getting hard to distinguish human voices from artificially intelligent ones.  If, though, we could actually learn to hear God, to recognize his voice... we would have a chance of leading people in a way that mattered, now and later.

• Success as a pastor is about growing up. Maturing, acquiring wisdom, avoiding distraction, living freely within God’s restraints, deepening in love for people, looking to Christ as our primary source of identity. Success as a pastor is more about growing up than growing numbers.

Why Size is the Wrong Question: Focusing on Organic Community Life

You’ve noticed, of course, that nothing I’ve said here about pastoral success has anything to do with size: the numbers, the buildings, the status or the ambition that marks conventional success.

Well, is there a perfect size of church? I don’t think so, though I still tend to lean smaller, so ministry can be personal. Downsizing has allowed me to know everyone at our church—that’s worth a lot. And I think the reality of the future will be more small churches, more part-time pastors and more bi-vocational leaders. But large churches can do things to form smaller communities within the whole, and large church senior pastors can at minimum be a pastor to their staff... which are bigger than most churches. Rich community life can take many forms but all of them need a pastor.

In the end, success might come down to simply discerning where you are supposed to be. Pastors aren’t looking for secure jobs, they’re listening for a call. If you hear God’s voice and feel the thrill of the Spirit and do the Abraham thing and just GO out of obedience... you will have a chance to point people to Jesus and help them learn to pray and hear and live and die in Christ.  If that is success, the downright laughable thing is that it’s not mine or yours. It’s God’s. He got exactly what he wanted.  Again.