“Well, if your church doesn’t grow,” a former pastor’s wife said to Barbara Hughes, “Kent is going to feel like a failure.” Barbara had been talking with a woman whose husband had left the pastorate to sell life insurance. She knew that success in ministry is generally measured by growth in numbers. Kent and Barbara were struggling with a declining church, and Kent felt like a failure. They tell their story in Liberating Ministry from the Success Syndrome. I remember sitting in a classroom years ago listening to Kent and Barbara and thinking how helpful it was to me as a new pastor. Barbara told the woman, “I don’t know why, but you are wrong, and I’m not going to rest until I find out why!” 

 

We often measure ministry success by numbers whether we like to admit it or not. Successful pastors are those who attract lots of people. Unsuccessful pastors do not. But it is a false paradigm that leads to discouragement. Can a pastor be a success in a small church? Yes! What happens if the church growth chart goes down not up? We may be called to a Jeremiah ministry! Jeremiah was a success as God measures success. A Jeremiah ministry is a successful ministry.

God called Jeremiah to shepherd His people (Jer. 1:4-10), but He told Jeremiah that the ministry would be hard. The people would oppose him. Conflicts would engulf him. He would be unsuccessful by the standards of this world, but God would make Him strong (Jer. 1:17-19). He must be faithful, and he was. Jeremiah told the nation not to ally with Egypt, but they did. Jeremiah preached repentance, but they rejected his message. After God judged the nation by the Babylonian army, the remnant wanted to flee to Egypt. Jeremiah told them not to run away from God’s will (Jer. 42), but they did it anyway. They disobeyed God and fled to Egypt. Jeremiah went with them (Jer. 43). After all, he was their pastor even in disobedience. Jeremiah lived out his days pastoring the people in exile, teaching them God’s word and God’s will. He gave them hope for the future even in their failure.

 God called Jeremiah “to pluck up and break down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant” (Jer. 1:10). His call covers the gamut of ministry – and so does our’s. It is easy to feel successful during the building and the planting but who likes the plucking up and breaking down? Pastors quit or move on to a new ministry when the going gets tough because they are seeking success. I wanted to be successful too. I looked around at growing ministries and longed for the same success. My discontentment with God’s calling metastasized into envy. It took me a long time to realize that God didn’t call me to that kind of ministry. I learned to be content with God’s calling for me. I learned that God measures my success by my obedience to His call not by comparison to other ministries.

Jeremiah suffered through the siege of Jerusalem with the same people who had rejected his message. He chronicled his agony in Lamentations, but he learned of God’s compassion and faithfulness in their suffering (Lam. 3:22-23). We learn more about ourselves and God through suffering than through success. There is great beauty in brokenness! God uses pain to test our faithfulness. How we handle sorrow demonstrates true success to God. I can remember the days when our growth chart climbed upward. Pride set in as I looked at our success, and God had to humble me. I had to learn to shepherd people as the growth chart declined. Sin, circumstances, and conflict took their toll but running away is not the solution. It is, ironically, in our failures that we learn God’s yardstick for success. Will we remain faithful to God’s call when ministry is in decline?

Jeremiah continued to point people to their hope in God’s future. He preached about God’s loyal love for His people even in times of sin. God’s grace is greater than our sin (Jer. 31:31-34). He would never see God’s future promises fulfilled, but he refused to stop preaching restoring grace to the people he pastored. Jeremiah’s ministry ended with incompletion. So does our’s! Sooner or later we all pass on the ministry to others. Whether the church grows big or stays small, our ministries will end with incompletion. As I near the day when I will retire from the pastorate of a church I have led for 27 years, I am aware that I will hand the baton of leadership to another. My ministry is incomplete because people are incomplete, but my calling continues. I like how Os Guinness puts it.

STAY FAITHFUL, MY FRIENDS, STAY FAITHFUL!