Great post.

Actually, there is a difference between excellence and “results” (assuming your singular desired result isn’t to be excellent)

The post I did yesterday on cost vs effectiveness should illustrate that.

You are right in the sense that I hope that what we “get” from this post is a focus on results and/or stewardship.

But rather

Cost vs Results?

I mean, if we are all about excellent rather than results then we miss the point don’t we?

“Then Jesus gathered his staff of leaders together and did gift assessments. He told them. We need to build a big church building with lost of attendees. Each disciple was delegated to according to their myers-briggs profile. Jesus said, “look… folks around here are hungry, so let’s tell them we’re going to feed them food, but before we feed them, we’ll preach at them. We’ll give them the four spiritual laws so they can go do heaven. Blessed are the poor…er.. wait.. I mean, God will bless you if you do things well for him.”

The disciples each did their ministry with excellence.
Peter started a surfing ministry, and while many thought he was drunk often, he had the best boards, with the best teachers money could buy to get people to accept Jesus as their person Lord and savior.

John started a children’s ministry. He did it with excellence. Parent’s were happy that they didn’t have to spend the time with their kids, and that the staff took care of everything. They did oil painting, though for some reason John avoided the hot oil, and occassionally they would have andrew come in and tear a phone book in half to entertain the kids. this was always followed by an invitation to heaven. Mark tamed a lion, which impressed the large crowds.
Bill Gaither, then only 16 sang a song.
Matthew did a drama to “the champion” and told large crowds that God doesn’t care about politics, or the environment, he just wants you to go to heaven.
James decided that he’d take up an offering to pay the bills for such an impressive ministry, and so it could be done with excellence.
Judas started an accounting firm named Arther anderson.

For the finale Jesus would walk on water, heal a few folks, pray for a few others, and say something like, “Now that I have your attention
do you know that that you know that you know that if you died tonight that you’d go to heaven up in the sky in the 4th dimension somewhere else.” some people raised their hands others just looked at him like wondering what he was talking about as heaven and messiah meant radically different things to the jewish people.

Then Jesus said something like, “Go into all the world start churches an advertise about how great your church is and how relevant you are to their lives. then when you get them there, tell them about heaven.” The people who raised their hands felt pretty good, until the disciples started being killed off.

or maybe not.

1 corinthians 10:31 isn’t talking about excellence at all. Paul is talking about faithfulness, but not even in performance, but in terms of living within the freedom of believers to be able to eat meet sacrificed to idols, if it’s no big deal to the person offering the food. not quite the same conversation as an american perspective, yeah matt i still think it’s american, work toward excellence.

In Colossians Paul seems to be talking about appropriate ways to treat slaves and ways in which slaves should respond to their masters. this passage is way closer to the point you are trying to make, but it still misses the mark.(imo) to compare the relationship of slaves and their masters to a church running a program that has the perceptions of flawlessness is a different thing.

and finally, I’m at a loss for how to respond to your Moses line of thinking. If you want to equate running a church with excellence to the sacrifice of animals, and the Jewish practice then I think you can probably develop biblical support for whatever you might fancy.

“Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving.” Col 3:23-24 (NIV)

If everything we do is in service to the Lord and for His glory, shouldn’t it be the BEST we can offer? Under the law of Moses the people were not allowed to sacrifice just any animal–it had to be SPOTLESS and WITHOUT BLEMISH.

That sounds to me like EXCELLENCE is a Biblical quality–with the caveat that it depends on what the definition of “IS” is. ;-)

SIMILARITIES
> We are both about 3 yrs old
> We both average about 200
> We are both very effective in reaching unchurched
> We both run seeker-sensitive services
> We both recommend each others church :)

MAIN DIFFERENCE
> They were a plant from a megachurch in Hawaii. We started with a bunch of mates with no money or staff.
> Their pastor was trained at a megachurch (he is awesome). We had no formal ministry experience.
> They spend a truck load of money. We are very cheap to run.
> They have colour bulletins. We have B&W.
> They have multi-level inner-city office space. We hire one office room for $100/wk.
> … you get the picture.

MY POINT…
Us smaller churches have so much to learn from Megachurches, but we need to do it without the mega-budget. There is a lot that mega-churches do which add to excellence, cost money, take time, but may not really add to the bottom line of making disciples.

I like that you said that there is a right answer. Sometimes it doesn’t seem so.

I think when it comes to excellence we need to think outside the box and not align ourselves with the American version of excellence like Riddle referred to.

Excellence does not equal more.

Cody,

That is the challenge. It can always be a little more excellent…the curve does not actually go flat…just a very slight increase.

The only way I know to manage it is to keep asking the question. Since most churches have limited resources, another exercise that might help is one where you compare opportunities. If I had $1000 to spend, which of these three areas would improve the most? Sometimes you can then begin to see where the curve has flattened.

Mark,
Though I don’t process things in quite the same way that you do, I am tracking with your thinking.

I’ve long thought that excellence isn’t a biblical value, it’s an american value. So often I’ll write it off. But today I’m second guessing myself.. at least a little bit. I tend to be a perfectionist… for others… not so much with myself. It’s a flaw I daily struggle to work through. I personally think about doing things well, doing things right, and impressions people get when they encounter things I lead or am responsible for. I’m wondering if is the same thing you mean when you say excellence. I still believe that excellence is an American, or at least heavily influenced by western thought. Regardless of where it comes from, I don’t see it as a Christian ideal. To me faithfulness captures it better. Today I think I’ll add missional stewardship to the list of kingdom values.

Now, I am thinking that embracing a cultural value to reach a culture can make a lot of sense and may be one of the many reasons lifechurch has connected with people. This is contextualizing the gospel to a certain people with a certain worldview. (I’m slow, but this afternoon I’m connecting these dots.) Every church does this to an extent, it’s just that some are connecting cultural values to people that the world no longer holds. (ie denominationalism, republican, social justice, if you build it they will come, and seeker stuff etc)

So this is interesting to me. Where this can become unhelpful and dangerous is when we claim or start to believe that the American values are actually God’s values, or biblical values. Then we are making the same mistakes as the dying churches who are struggling in our cities. We’re just a bit more current, but only relatively so.

Not every growing healthy church embraces excellence, just as not every growing healthy church embraces anything one thing.
What do you think?

From a people standpoint I find that the more I build into relationships with people those expectations seems to be less important because they know my heart. We still need to strive for excellance but it isn’t the only thing that matters.