Purpose Driven???

I just finished Rick Warren's purpose driven church. Inside I found plenty of insights to the growth of their church in the LA area as well as plenty of how tos and don't dos. But the whole while I was reading this something kept nawing at me. Is church all about growth or is about something more. We look at churches and automatically classify them as a success or failure by their attendence numbers. Come on, we all do it. "So how is the church?" "Whatcha running?" and on and on. When you hear of a church having two or three services your first thought is, "wow, they got it going on..." and success is assumed. Well I got to thinking about that, we could go to four services this week, have a Saturday night service, and then do a 8:30AM, a 10:00AM, and an 11:30 AM for those late sleepers, and we will be successful, right? Well I can see we would have a few younger adults there for the Saturday night service as they hang out anyway on Saturday night and they would not have to get up Sunday. And the early AM service, well the lake people would love that, get out early enough to be on the water by noon. And the other two services would be filled with the not so early risers and the ones who want the traditional meeting time when GOD goes to church. So we go to our next big Pastors conference and when they say, how is the church, we can say, "Man it is crazy, we have gone to four services!!" and the people will look at us and go, "you got it going on..." when really we haven't done squat...

So what is success? Was JESUS successful? In the light of today, he had 12 members, no permanent meeting place, and the other church down the road hated his guts. Of his 12 members, lets see, he had a hothead, a couple of dirty ole fisherman who were unemployed, a tax collector who has no friends and had recently quit his job, and some other ragamuffins. Of the twelve that he had, one ran away and hid after denying him three times, the other 10 hid away in town afraid for their lives and one sold him out for 30 pieces of silver and went and commited suicide. Yep, that was successful!!

So I think when qualifying success in church, you have to look at two things. First, are the people growing their relationship with GOD. And second, is the leader replicating himself. Well in JESUS' church the first is answered with a yes. They were all growing in faith and wisdom in the things of GOD. And to answer the second question, JESUS groomed 11 men to continue on the ministry he started. And the one that fell away, well even after death JESUS commisioned another to take that one's place to fulfill the 12. So when looking at success and failure in the church, we need to take a different look at how we define success and failure.