About six months ago, I wrote an article titled “Celebrating Some Wins" where I reported for you several things that were going well among us in this particular local body of believers. In this article, I wanted to give you some reasons why I don’t report stuff like that to you even more often than I currently do. Here are some reasons:
1) Sometimes I forget. It is easy to get caught up in the daily grind of life and ministry and therefore forget to tell others about the great things God is doing among us.
2) Sanctification is hard to quantify and communicate. I realize that if I were the head of a widget manufacturing company, I could make reports to investors using words like, “We produced 150,000 widgets this past year, compared to 120,000 last year.” But in the Kingdom of God, success doesn’t always look like that. Sure, there are some successes in church life that can be illustrated through numbers: Church attendance, financial stability, number of community groups, etc. But those numbers wouldn’t communicate the whole story. A church could have high numbers in those areas and be unhealthy, and vice-versa.
When you look at things like spiritual growth, how do you measure it and communicate it to the rest of the church? It’s not like I can say, “Hey, our church grew by 85 Sanctification Points this year!” How can you quantify what happens when a woman who used to fly off the handle all the time, grows in self-control? How can you measure the goodness of the man who used to go to work only to make more money for himself, switching to “working as unto the Lord” and being content with what he has?
The only way I know how to tell you about what the Spirit is doing among us would be to tell you stories. But there are three factors that make it difficult, which I will describe in the next three reasons.
3) Stories are longer and harder to communicate than statistics. Someone can show a line graph of community group attendance, going from 50 people up to 300 people, and it communicates a lot of progress with just a simple image. But a story of a man who almost abandoned his wife, but then repented, and chose to reconcile with her… well, that would take a lot more time to tell. Some stories of sanctification cannot be told quickly or easily to a large audience.
4) Confidentiality. I often can’t share many of the stories of which I am aware. For instance, let’s imagine the above situation about the guy who almost abandoned his wife. Imagine he came to us for counseling and we helped him reconcile with her. That would be a huge win! However, in many cases, I’m simply unable to share that story. Perhaps, for the sake of his 4-year old daughter and 6-year old son, that story shouldn’t be announced to 500 people. And of course, over time, very few people would ever seek out any kind of counsel if they knew the most difficult parts of their lives would be broadcast to everyone.
5) I don’t know everything that is going on. Sometimes, God does something wonderful in someone’s life and they don’t tell me! I’m sure there are plenty of people who evangelize, serve, build, confront, restore, lead, teach, befriend, forgive, learn, worship, or show mercy, and they don’t run to tell me about it. Occasionally, I will find out that God used some part of Good News Church in a significant way, but I don’t learn about it until months or years later. These are still “wins” even though I didn’t know about them.
My point in bringing all this up? Simply this: I want you to know that good things are happening in the lives of the people connected to Good News Church. I hear stories all the time and am greatly encouraged about the work that we are doing! I wish I could share all of these stories with you. In fact, I recently told the elders that I thought that the congregation would be even more supportive of our church than they currently are, if only they knew all of these things that were being accomplished.
We will continue to try to pass information along when we can. We already have a StoryTeam who has catalogued some of the things that are going on in the lives of our people. Occasionally people share their stories on Sunday morning (here, here, and here) and I try to share things through newsletter articles as well (here, here, and here). And if you can, we’d love for you to share with us what God is doing in your life.
In the meantime, know this. God is still at work. His people are continuing to respond to His voice. Not perfectly. But often. People are coming to faith. Relationships are being restored. People are repenting of sin. People are learning God’s Word. It’s happening. And it’s encouraging.
