Pastors, let's stop looking for programs or methods that "work", and instead start paying more attention to the God who is at work within our people. Jesus never handed out a formula for "city transformation" when He sent out the the 72. He didn't introduce a curriculum that would turn followers into disciples when He gave the Great Commission. The way that Jesus works is always intensely personal and unequivocally local.
What if we led our churches in the same way? What if we stopped trying to push people through a process we designed in a boardroom and called "discipleship"? What if we stopped being addicted to results and instead began to love the soil we labor in? Maybe we'd be less like the corporate "farmers" who run feedlots and call it a ranch. Maybe we'd be shepherds who know their sheep, farmers who love their soil, pastors who don't depersonalize people and call it "church growth".
There are particularities about your community, your congregation. Pay attention to it. Look for it. See God as the gardener who may be surrounding the tree with manure to make it grow. He is at work. Let's learn to pay more attention to Him and less to the leaders of church corporations and franchises of faith...even if they may be packing out conferences and dishing out methods from their own experience of "success". It's hollow. It's a lie. Let's not buy it any more.
Let's recover the sacredness of the pastoral vocation.
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