Pastors Can’t Fake Mission

I first saw this graph at a leadership retreat with other pastors and elders at the first church I worked at. It was used in that context to describe how people react to change. Sometimes this is used to describe the Tipping Point of getting the first two brackets. Other times this is used to help understand why you can ‘t get the old people to ditch the organ. However very rarely do you put yourself in either of the two categories to the right.

In leadership you always fake it as an innovator or an early adopter. However the numbers don’t lie, there just aren’t that many innovators out there.

I have personally experienced this and witnessed it elsewhere in church leadership circles. Pastors want to be innovators or the early adopters of whatever the latest conference speaker shared.

However that is until I started listening to the missional folks, specifically Alan Hirsch and the Ferguson brothers of Community Christian in Naperville. The idea is relatively simple: the number of people who are predisposed to church already have one and the people who aren’t (as many as 60% of the population) are being ignored. Therefore to be “on mission” means to go to these people, or to meet them on their terms for ministry.

Straightforward, simple, and compelling. However, this starts to mess with all sorts of assumptions of church leaders because it moves ministry away from an academic pursuit to a life pursuit. An academic pursuit can be done in isolation with defined values like degrees, academies, and book deals. While a life pursuit is messy, never ends, and doesn’t have tenure.

As a pastor who likes the academic side of things and has liked to portray myself as an innovator, this is messing with me. I am realizing just how isolated my life is and it is bothering me.

Faking mission is impossible because it comes with results.

You are either on mission or you aren’t.