NPPMagSims

Nonprofit

Professional

Performance

Magazine

ow you define success defines

you. Success isn’t good or bad,

but we all have some sort of metric of

success. For me, more than anything

else, success is stewarding well what’s

been entrusted to our care. It’s a

stewardship issue.

Some of this may not work for the non-

religious sector,but fromaChristian nonprofit

direction, stewardship is knowing that Jesus

will never say to us at the end of our days,

“What did you do with what I didn’t give

you?” He’ll only ask, “What did you do with

what I gave you?” It’s Jesus’s parable of the

one, two, or five talents. He isn’t thanking one

because he had five, he’s honoring those who

had different ones because two of the three

actually stewarded well what was entrusted to

them. And he got angry at the one who didn’t

steward it well and simply became fearful.

Unfortunately, in the church world, we’ve

gotten this mixed up, and stolen the metrics

of success from the business world.Those are

the three Bs of buildings, bodies, and budget:

how much, how often, how big? What we’re

saying is, you’re a successful pastor if you have

a large building, lots of bodies (attendance is

up),and a big

budget.If

all those things are up,

you’re successful. If all those things are down,

you’re a really unsuccessful pastor, a failure

– in fact, we may not have you around for

much longer. This is an over-generalization,

but what’s needed is a metric that involves

faithfulness and fruitfulness. It’s much more

of a long-term thing that has to be driven

by grace, not by performance. Unfortunately,

pastors can very easily make methods and

models an idol, believing in them more than

the Messiah. So we have to be really careful.

I’m not against large churches. I’m against

impure motives of ambition toward large

churches. Competition and comparison eat

away at contentment and joy. Redefining

success: I love congruence, because congruence

is a big deal, wherever you are.The congruence

of the story of my church or organization had

better match the congruence of story of our

founder, our vision, or the people we’re trying

to serve. If it doesn’t, there are going to be

problems!

Congruence means the church world should

shift its thinking, prioritizing process over

product. Instead of prioritizing results, look

at relationships. Both are important, but

prioritize relationships over results, stories

over pure numbers, and congruence over

efficiency.

Jesus was a very inefficient leader, but he was

so effective that his followers are still around

two millennia later. If you looked at his

leadership principles, I doubt he’d be invited

to speak at many leadership conferences

today. In some ways we’re redefining success,

but actually it’s just reminding us of the

way Jesus talks about “success.” I like the

word health much better, because healthy

things reproduce. Growth isn’t always

healthy: cancer grows faster than anything

else. Healthy things mature and reproduce at

the rate in which that organism or nonprofit

or faith community needs to, based on

the health of that organization.

When I was young, my dad had

tomato plants, and he’d put a popular

garden fertilizer on them – probably a

little too much.There’s a picture of me

on my dad’s shoulders, reaching as high as I

could, unable to reach the top of the plant.The

tomatoes were the size of large grapefruits.

They impressed the neighbors, who came to

take pictures. But they didn’t taste very good.

Why? Because they were unnatural.They had

been chemically altered, so they were not the

way a tomato is supposed to be. Often we try

to throw fertilizer on, and we can impress the

neighbors but, deep down, it’s not really the

tomato as it was intended to be.That ambition

is always there to reach for the fertilizer, those

methods or those metrics that we could use

to enhance this flow and ambition. We have

to be aware of that in our own spirits.

J.R. Briggs is the author of

Fail: Finding Hope and

Grace in the Midst of Ministry Failure

, and he describes

himself as husband, daddy, friend, author, shepherd,

teacher, pastor, church planter, failure, peace-maker,

rule-breaker, dreamer.

Redefining Success

J.R. Briggs