How to know you are.

In my years as a Discipleship Pastor I went through a bit of a transformation as I struggled with how to best measure success. At first it was setting the audacious goal of having every member in a small group. When I couldn’t even get every elder in a small group it became abundantly clear that my goal was either unrealistic or just plain wrong. As I evaluated it also became abundantly clear that we really were not doing a good job as a church at tracking how we were doing. The two default metrics for every church to measure is attendance and money, and that is basically what we were doing.

After transitioning into my new role as Serve Pastor, aka Missions Pastor, I ran across Brennan Manning’s book shipped from Neue, aka Relevant, and it all became quite simple…

“How do your people love?”

How well…

How often…

Who…

Dave Gibbons, at the Story Conference, raised questions that really point back to,

“How does your leadership love?”

2 Peter 1:1-13 is a passage worth hanging on the wall of every Church Leader, Discipleship Pastor, and Church Guru. The end result in making Disciples is Christlikeness, and Christlikeness’s primary character trait is Love.

Verse 3 implies that our knowledge of Jesus should grow. Verse 5 implies that the promises of Jesus need to be applied for growth to take place.  Verses 5-8 indicate that the end product of growing will be love for EVERYONE. In fact, growing in knowledge is synonymous with growing in love.

The Church is in trouble when partaking in Bible Study is more important than serving widows, orphans, and the poor. Studying the Bible is beneficial, but it should never be done in lieu of or instead of APPLYING it through acts of service to the unloved.

Here’s the rub…this is not easy, nor comfortable. This kind of love is a violent kind of love that reaches inside the hearts of people exposes their wicked and diseased hearts and offers the balm of the blood of Jesus Christ that will heal them. More on this later…