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Beyond Results-Driven Ministry
What might it look like to truly see ministry through the eyes of faith rather than natural eyes?
Since before Christmas, two related but separate conversations have served as a proverbial stone in my shoe. They both got me thinking about our “functional” authority when it comes to church planting models and expectations. The first was with a good friend who knows the church-ministry world in Australia well, and the second was with a church planter in Europe. Both were processing how, in their contexts, the example of extraordinary “once-in-a-generation” ministers was shaping expectations around them. There was a pragmatism at work that said, “They’ve clearly got it right, now how do we replicate that?” rather than starting with first principles. Something subtle but significant was happening—a quiet shift in where we locate authority.
Last time, we considered church-planting models beyond Paul, exploring the New Testament’s diverse approaches through Timothy, Titus, Peter, and others. This month, I want us to consider a more uncomfortable question: Do our church-planting models and expectations actually come from the Scriptures, or, if we’re brutally honest, do they come from gifted individuals in the church-planting world?
The Authority of Results
There’s a question that shapes much contemporary church planting and ministry: “Does it work?” We look at growing churches, successful plants, and influential leaders, and we reverse-engineer their methods. We create movements and conferences around them, write books about their approaches, and train the next generation to replicate their models. The underlying assumption is clear: results validate ministry. Growth proves faithfulness. Impact demonstrates God’s blessing.
We might affirm sola scriptura in our statements of faith, but in practice, we often defer to measurable outcomes. The church plant that reaches 500 people in two years gets noticed, celebrated, and studied. The bivocational planter faithfully present in the same neighborhood for a decade, building relationships with fifteen people, gets overlooked—or worse, viewed as a cautionary tale about what happens when you don’t have the right model or gifted enough leadership.
This is particularly insidious because results feel like vindication. If a church is growing rapidly, if conversions are happening, if the model is replicating across multiple sites—surely God is blessing it, right? The numbers seem to speak for themselves.
But Scripture offers a more convoluted picture. Jesus had moments where crowds walked away (John 6:66, we mentioned this last month). Paul boasts in his weaknesses (2 Corinthians 12:9-10). The prophets were often ignored or persecuted. The way of the cross looked like an abject failure for any onlooker—Jesus executed as a criminal with followers who mostly fled. Yet this “failure” was the hinge point of human history.
The Exceptionalism Problem
This results-driven approach creates another troubling pattern: we build our ministry models around exceptional individuals. We study Tim Keller’s church planting in Manhattan and beyond, or the latest rapidly-growing multisite church, and assume their approach is universally applicable. But to be frank, we’re often observing the fruit of rare giftedness rather than a replicable template.
The biblical qualifications for church leadership are strikingly ordinary: faithful, self-controlled, hospitable, and able to teach (1 Timothy 3, Titus 1). There’s nothing about vision-casting ability, entrepreneurial instinct, or charismatic communication. Jesus chose fishermen and tax collectors. The early church grew through networks of ordinary believers meeting in ordinary homes. Priscilla and Aquila were ordinary tentmakers who hosted churches and discipled leaders while practicing their trade.
The biblical norm seems to be humble, available people empowered by the Spirit—not the exceptionally gifted few. Yet we’ve created systems that depend on finding and replicating exceptional leaders. When that model inevitably fails to scale (because the exceptional are, by definition, in short supply!), we blame the “unsuccessful” planters rather than questioning the model itself.
Why We Default to Results
Several forces drive this results-orientation:
First, there’s anxiety about relevance. In post-Christian contexts where the church no longer has default cultural authority, we feel pressure to prove Christianity still “works.” Results become our apologetic—to skeptics, yes, but vitally, also to ourselves.
Second, consumerist imagination has shaped our thinking. We’ve absorbed marketplace metrics—scale, efficiency, return on investment—and baptized them as kingdom values. The “customer” comes first, whether that’s the unchurched person we’re trying to reach or, as is too often the case, the donor funding the plant.
Third, there’s lack of “ecclesiological patience.” The church has endured for 2,000 years through every conceivable context. Faithfulness in one generation may bear fruit in the next. But we want results now—within our ministry tenure, within our strategic planning cycle. We’ve lost the long view.
Finally, perhaps there’s a kind of functional Pelagianism at work? We implicitly believe the right technique, the right model, the right leader can produce church growth. It’s salvation by works, just adorned in ministry language. We’ve forgotten that we plant and water, but God gives the growth (1 Corinthians 3:6-7).
Seeing Through the Eyes of Faith
Faith, by definition, involves believing what is not yet fully visible. It means trusting that small (mostly invisible) acts of faithfulness matter, that unseen character formation is more important than attendance figures, that God’s economy doesn’t operate by our metrics. Hebrews 11 celebrates people who “died in faith, not having received the things promised”—yet they were commended for their faithfulness, not their results.
What might it look like to truly see ministry through the eyes of faith rather than natural eyes?
It might mean celebrating the pastor who’s been faithfully present in the same “anonymous” neighborhood for decades, known and trusted even if the congregation remains small. It might mean valuing the depth of community, the quality of discipleship, the transformation of character—things nearly impossible to quantify but eternally significant.
It would certainly mean resisting the tyranny of the measurable. As the saying goes, “Not everything that counts can be counted.”Some of the most important kingdom work—formation of character, depth of love, quality of presence— defies our spreadsheets.
Most fundamentally, it would require recovering an eschatological perspective. The ultimate “result” often isn’t within our lifetime. We’re planting seeds we may never see harvested–and that’s ok. We’re building with materials whose value will only be revealed when tested by fire (1 Corinthians 3:12-15). That requires a deep trust that God is faithful across generations, that his purposes unfold in His timing, not ours.
The Danger of Globalization
What struck me about those two pre-Christmas conversations was their geographic spread—Australia and Europe—yet their essential similarity. This isn’t just an American or Western problem, though it may have originated there. These results-driven models—with all their embedded assumptions about success, scale, and exceptional individuals—are being exported globally through networks, partnerships, and funding structures. Well-meaning Western churches inadvertently export an entire cultural framework along with their ministry methods.
The irony is that some of the most vibrant, faithful expressions of church globally are happening in places that look nothing like the Western “successful” model—house churches in restrictive contexts, slow-growing communities in post-Christian Europe, deeply rooted congregations in the Majority World that emphasize presence and community over size and innovation.
Relocating Our Authority
If we’re serious about relocating our authority in God’s Word rather than results, it requires more than tweaking our methods. It demands theological reorientation:
We need formation that precedes technique—teaching a theology of faithfulness, hiddenness, and patient cultivation before we teach church planting strategies.
We need to resist pressure to only value what we can measure.
We need to let Scripture’s actual diversity of models, its celebration of weakness, and its patience with smallness genuinely shape our imaginations.
This would be profoundly counter-cultural. It might mean smaller budgets, less impressive stories, and fewer conference speaking invitations. But it might also mean greater faithfulness—and ultimately, that’s the only result that truly matters.
The question isn’t whether our ministry “works” by measurable standards. The question is whether we’re faithfully embodying what God has called us to, trusting him with outcomes we cannot see, and learning to evaluate ministry not by natural sight but by the eyes of faith.
Lord, may it increasingly be so.
