April 26, 2024
I know that the church is made up of redeemed sinners who are hardly perfect. All of us have room for improvement, and none of us always gets everything right. Nevertheless, our churches must set excellence as the standard in everything we do. Here’s why:
We do church for God, not for us. Everything we do as a church must be done for the glory of God (1 Cor. 10:31). To settle for anything less than excellence, then, is to ignore this requirement.
No church defaults into excellence. Rather, we all default into the routine ... into maintenance ... into no longer seeing our needs for improvement. Unless we keep pushing for excellence, we settle for less than the best.
We can do less than excellence in our own power. That’s a problem, actually. When we commit to do everything with excellence, though, we imperfect people need God’s help to reach that goal – and recognized dependence on Him is always good.
Mediocrity is a poor witness. Whether we like it or not, the world is watching us. Guests who don’t always know church visit our churches. They don’t understand why we present something that is less than well done.
Accepting less than excellence can be a spiritual copout. You’ve heard words like these: “Please pray for me. I didn’t have much time to prepare, so God will have to help me.” Sometimes emergencies do happen, but often these words are a spiritualized excuse for laziness or poor time management.
This commitment forces us to work on improvement. Too many churches have no strategy to regularly assess and improve what they’re doing. A commitment to excellence demands a change in that process.
Excellence demands training. It’s tough to reach excellence if you don’t know how to do what you’re tasked to do. That’s one reason why we must train and equip believers (not to mention Ephesians 4:11-13 ...).
We’re equipping the next generations of church leaders. If we settle for mediocrity on our watch, we’re setting up the church to make the same mistake for decades to come.
This post originally appeared at ChuckLawless.com.
