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The Pastor's Heart with Dominic Steele
Christian leaders join Dominic Steele for a deep end conversation about our hearts and different aspects of Christian ministry each Tuesday afternoon.
We share personally, pastorally and professionally about how we can best fulfill Jesus' mission to save the lost and serve the saints.
The discussion is broadcast live on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/thepastorsheart">Facebook</a> then on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@ThePastorsHeart">YouTube</a> and on our <u><b><a href="http://www.thepastorsheart.net">thepastorsheart.net</a></u></b> website and via audio podcast.
The Pastor's Heart with Dominic Steele
Andrew Heard responds: The Case for Goal-Driven Churches
Andrew Heard says ministries cannot be other than outcome-focused in their work - the question is will those outcomes be good or bad? Conscious or unconscious? Specific or vague?
He addresses critics who confuse having Biblical goals with adopting secular business practices.
Andrew Heard leads the Reach Australia movement, and pastors the influential EV Church on the Central Coast.
• All Christians are goal-driven whether consciously or unconsciously
• Critique often conflate goals with the methods used to pursue them (which is a separate question).
• Paul in 1 Corinthians demonstrates strategic thinking while maintaining gospel integrity
• "Wise master builder" suggests skill and thoughtfulness in ministry, not just faithfulness
• Personal, transformational ministry requires organisation.
• Opposition to large churches and attempting to grow churches creates an impossible task for reaching the world. We need to own the fact that we either need much bigger churches or many more churches, or both.
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It is the pastor's heart and Dominic Steele and the controversies surrounding pursuing goals and outcomes in Christian ministry. Andrew Hurd is our guest. The Apostle Paul was goal-driven at every point in his ministry. He took great care in pursuing the goals that were the most God-honouring and in using the best God-appointed means to achieve those goals. That's Andrew Heard.
Speaker 1:In ministry, we cannot be other than goal-driven. We might be consciously goal-driven or unconsciously goal-driven, but we are goal-driven. For us, andrew Heard says, the question is is our goal a worthy one? And yet I have read, watched and heard critiques of this kind of thinking from friends for a while now. Sometimes the critique is that having goals well, that's a sellout to the church growth movement. Sometimes it's a critique of businessification, applying KPIs, efficiency models and leadership training from the secular world. Andrew Heard is Senior Pastor of the influential EV Church on the central coast of New South Wales and leader of the Reach Australia movement. Andrew, thanks for coming in. You have been pushing for change in the church for a while now and now you're receiving some pushback or not just now I think from the first.
Speaker 2:No, it's. It's regularly uh people raising questions, but helpfully so I just should say I think, I think one of the sharpened your thinking, necessarily. So, yeah, I think the one of the beautiful things about our world is that our Christian fellowship together is that we've got a real honesty and a real nudge back and forward very helpfully thoughtful engagement in these areas. It's a great blessing our kind of group of people who wrestle with these things. So it's all been good.
Speaker 1:I love it. So what is goal-driven ministry and what's the critique that you've heard?
Speaker 2:Well, I would call it outcome leadership, so I use the language of outcome. But goal-driven ministry is to say the same thing that if I'm going to be involved in ministry I need to have an outcome in mind, a goal to pursue, so be driven by that goal and seeking to achieve it. And the critique.
Speaker 2:Well, the critique is that it gets. I think it gets a little odd, and sometimes the critique bundles together ideas that I don't think ought to be held together, such as goal-driven is sometimes understood to include the means and manner by which you pursue it.
Speaker 1:So if you put under that umbrella Not just the ends but how I get there, yeah, so we would call that kind of combining two different things.
Speaker 2:So sometimes people say the whole idea of outcome-driven leans too much into business practice, leans too much into worldly wisdom. And it can undoubtedly. But when you separate the fact of having a goal from how you pursue the goal, then I think, as Christians, we can't be other than goal-driven, we can't be other than outcome leaders.
Speaker 1:Well, let's just play with that for a minute. I mean, I think you're saying we are goal-driven. I might have defined it well, or I might not have defined it well. Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 2:I don't think humans can be other than goal-driven. I think we have a telos built into us, a purpose we're made for achieving ends, and so in Christian ministry, I don't think it's possible to actually be in Christian ministry without having a goal that you are pursuing, an outcome you're driven towards. The problem for us is if that's true. The problem for us is if we don't pay attention to being outcome driven, we'll be less self-reflective on what those outcomes actually are, and so, buried beneath the verbal expression of what I might be trying to achieve, will be less God-honouring outcomes that I'm trying to pursue like to be liked. Do you know Right?
Speaker 1:So I could have a goal as a pastor to be liked.
Speaker 2:I'm never actually going to say that out loud and it may be buried sufficiently deeply that it's not even obvious to me, but you'll see it emerge in terms of the things we say yes to and the things we say no to to me, but you'll see it emerge in terms of the things we say yes to and the things we say no to. So you might find a particular leader. The only consistent way to work out why is he saying yes to that, why is she saying no to that, is because actually he or she just wants to be liked by people and doesn't want to offend, doesn't want to hurt. So I think, one way or another, we have outcomes and goals to which we're working and the more we acknowledge that and know that, the better we're able to actually analyse it together under the word of God and work out how worthy they are.
Speaker 1:So I mean, that sounds obvious to me. Why is somebody critiquing you on that? Or are they critiquing you over the methods?
Speaker 2:It seems obvious to me too. I think what's happening is people are perceiving the language of outcome-driven or goal-driven to be narrowed down to very banal kinds of goals or outcomes, like numbers, purely and simply so to be outcome Whereas if I want a disciple who is rich in their following of the Lord Jesus Christ holistically attempting to serve, love him, that kind of thing.
Speaker 2:And there's a whole range of outcomes that the scriptures would call us to have to glorify God in the establishment of people in the faith in a way that genuinely transforms their life, such that we build communities of love. I mean, there's a quick snapshot of an expression of what outcome we're after, but if you reduce that merely to a crowd in a building, then that is inappropriate and poorly conceived. So I think what happens is people take the idea badly exercised and bundle all that together and say it's wrong, whereas I'd offer no. The principle of being outcome-driven is not the problem. It's what you bundle together as the outcome that you're seeking to pursue.
Speaker 2:Paul, the Apostle, is the Lord. Jesus comes to seek and save the lost. There's an outcome Comes to glorify his Father. These are outcomes, you see, and the Apostle Paul is doing everything he can 1 Corinthians 9, to save as many as possible. These are all just simply outcomes, expressions of ends to which he's working. I cannot see how we can conceive of Christian ministry other than having an end to which we're working, a goal.
Speaker 1:Well, take me to 1 Corinthians 3, because there's been quite a contention about 1 Corinthians 3, and particularly 1 Corinthians 3, verse 10 and wise master builder.
Speaker 2:I'll read the whole verse and you can speak to it.
Speaker 1:According to God's grace that was given to me, I have laid a foundation as a skilled or wise master builder, and another builds on it, but each one is to be careful how he builds on it. No one can lay any other foundation than what has been laid. That foundation is Jesus Christ. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the question is, what do we do with the word? It's a compound little phrase there. It's sophos architectone. Yeah from I guess we get architect yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah yeah, and that little compound architectone is properly translated, I think many would say, as master builder. It's not just someone who builds, but it's the leader, it's the head builder. What do you do with the word Sophos in front of it? Do we translate as wise or as as the East, as skillful? Well, it depends on how much attention you pay to the use of the word sophos through 1.
Speaker 2:Corinthians 1-4, or whether there's a justification to say that phrase sophos architecton has a sufficient cultural baggage to it in its uses elsewhere that as a phrase it has its own meaning. Yeah, and I would argue that that's the case.
Speaker 1:What's the argument against you? And then what's your argument?
Speaker 2:Well, paul, makes much of the fact that the word sophos is. There's a critique and a challenge around what is wisdom, you see, and the Corinthians have one view of it, the Greeks have one view of it. If you like, have one view of it.
Speaker 1:if you like, yeah, and Paul comes, I'm being impressive, I'm doing good rhetoric, yeah, yeah, yeah, using good skills and things like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah with the toga and the kind of great rhetoric and so on. And Paul comes in weakness and fear and he presents the gospel without wise and persuasive words. He renounces the idea of that kind of wisdom.
Speaker 2:But when he comes to 1 Corinthians 3, verse 10, is he still using the word sophos wise in the way he's used it all the way through, or because it's part of that phrase, sophos architecton? Is he picking up the way that phrase is used, and I think we need to invite consideration of that? So it's used in Isaiah, it's used in Philo, these other places, and in each of those occasions it's used to mean a skilful builder, not just someone who is wise.
Speaker 1:That's the way it's understood Wise in the Corinthian sense, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so it then opens up whole questions around. What does Paul mean by coming in weakness? Does that? Are we to read him coming in weakness to mean he deliberately chooses ministry?
Speaker 1:practices that are feeble and ineffective and won't work, and stupid, yeah.
Speaker 2:And so, therefore, if we're to be faithful to Paul's ministry style, we're to come and do ministry in the least clever way possible so that we can say all the power belongs to God.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the gospel could only have grown here because of God, because I was truly useless. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I had no clue.
Speaker 2:I was clueless, hopeless and just did things in a really. So that's a discussion I think we need to be having, because my contention is that at chapter 3, verse 10, what Paul's doing is kind of a sideways critique of the Corinthians. So Paul came with a message that to the wise of the world and those who are looking for signs and wonders, was foolishness. It didn't fit. And Paul came determined to be faithful to that message, despite the way the culture around him perceived it. But does that also mean that he came without thoughtful ministry practices? Is that what he came in? Weakness means? And I think by the time you get to chapter 3, verse 10, what Paul's saying is I may appear to have been foolish to you, but I did actually come with skill. If you had the eyes to see it. I did actually lay a foundation as a skilful master builder, though you, corinthians, didn't see it. I think there's a shift going on in Paul's. So what about each?
Speaker 1:one is to be careful how he builds on it.
Speaker 2:I mean.
Speaker 1:I'm thinking. Be careful means I need to both make sure that I'm teaching the same gospel that was initially planted, but I actually need to think about how to do this in the best way possible.
Speaker 2:This is exactly the discussion, and it's an important one to have. Be careful in how you build. I think, certainly in its context, is a reference to make sure that if you build, you build according to the gospel, you build with the gospel. You continue to pay attention to the weakness of the message of Christ crucified Absolutely. But is he now starting to say a little bit more?
Speaker 1:I mean, I guess the question is is there a quantity as well as a quality that comes in there? Is there a and is there a? Yeah, I'll just stop at that point.
Speaker 2:Yeah well, is it? More is his only thought at that point. Make sure you preach the message in a certain way. Is that all he's speaking about? And given the language of laying a foundation and the ones who build on it, there is certainly a core, central aspect, which is the nature of the message that you preach, that you disciple people with and nurture people in. And there's certainly, given the flavour of those chapters, there's certainly a sense in which, however you do what you do in ministry, you've got to do it according to the texture of the gospel.
Speaker 2:So triumphalism, which is the great concern of 2 Corinthians, is ruled out. I can't come in triumph, except in so far as that's perceived by spiritual eyes to be triumphant. But I can't come triumphalistically, sort of seeking to win the Greeks by the things they love Absolutely. But does that rule out a use of wisdom that we would regard? So, for instance, paul's writings itself in those first four chapters is a very clever piece of rhetoric. So Paul learned how to put words together and create a persuasive argument writing to the Corinthians. That itself didn't come from the gospel, it came from his understanding of how you make words work in the world. Now, in one sense that's just bringing clever, thoughtful ministry practice. So Paul's doing it, and what does he mean, therefore, at Chapter 3?
Speaker 2:I think there's an added thing that's coming on here, I suspect too. What's going on is this sense? Is this the diagonalisation of Christopher Watkin? I don't want to claim too much. He might agree with me on this, but I do wonder a little bit what Paul's doing. He's saying once you die to human wisdom through the gospel, once you come to Jesus and find that pretentious Greek rhetoric killed, you'll have the eyes to better see what true wisdom is in ministry, what kinds of practices actually do align with the nature of the gospel, the nature of Christ crucified, and what kinds of ministry practices actually undermine the very nature of the gospel message we're preaching. But I think that's what Paul's wrestling with there. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So what about the suggestion, if you like that, all that thinking about the detail of once? You've said I need to go to there. Well, how am I going to get there? The steps, the effective organisation, all that kind of thing is all from paganism, all from pragmatism.
Speaker 2:The effective organisation, all that kind of thing is all from paganism, all from pragmatism. It cannot be given that the Apostle Paul has in his mind, when he writes the letter to the Corinthians, to persuade them of something. So the very letter itself is written to achieve an end and he has worked out how do I construct this letter to achieve that end. It is some very helpful thinking in the Australian church record on this. About strategy, we have a we can have a sort of a reaction, emotional reaction, against the language of strategy. But if strategy, if all strategy is planning to succeed, which a very fine article in the Australian Church Record talks about, if that's all strategy is planning to succeed, then if we want to succeed in seeing someone brought to Christ, then we will think about a plan to achieve that end.
Speaker 2:1 Corinthians 9. So Paul, jew too, greek too, those under law, those not Different strategies. He plans to work out how to best reach people with the news of Christ. He's strategic. He works out which cities to go to, where to go and these kinds of things he's thinking through. How can I best bring about the end to which Christ calls me, the salvation of the world, making disciples of all nations, if we don't pursue strategic thinking, how best to achieve an outcome, I think we're being, in the end, faithless, actually, as well as foolish in its broader sense as well as foolish in its broader sense.
Speaker 1:And do you?
Speaker 2:think that's what the people who are critiquing you are advocating. I don't. I hope not. I don't think so. I think what they're doing is one of the. I think the trigger and this is not an unhelpful thing I think the trigger for many is the dangers of business practices, so that language of businessification.
Speaker 2:I think the danger many people are seeing is the thought that Christian ministry might become reliant on a kind of 21st century business model and to the degree that church does that, I think the critique's right and helpful. You know, the extremes of that is that we cease to be prayerful, we cease to realise that all that we do is by the strength of God, by his power, that any fruit that comes is by the grace of God. You know there's one of the very clear and evidence kind of outcomes of that businessification of church life. But I think the danger is that people are seeing things from the top down and not appreciating from the bottom up. Can you explain what I mean? If you look at ministries from the top down, they can see some kinds of strategy structures that people might be employing to facilitate reaching people and growing and deepening and building communities of love. They can see the top down and go. That looks like business and it might well be and we need to repent of that. But if you think of it from the bottom up, which is a simple couple of ideas, we have noticed over the years that if I can get more non-Christians sitting with more thoughtful Christians in personal relationship, where questions can be asked and answered, where there can be life perceived and understood, if I can get more non-Christians into that kind of relational context, we'll see more people profess faith. Second, if I can get those who profess faith to be personally walked with and mentored through the things of Christ and established in church, less will bounce out. If I can follow them up in a very personal, transforming, spiritually hearted way, we'll see less people bounce out. Those two things to me seem to be self-evidently true. Well, here's the deal If I want to see more people brought to hear the things of Christ in a relational context, I need to organise, I need to work out how to get more people to apply to that work and how to make sure that happens in a healthy and proper way.
Speaker 2:I have to set up teams and then make sure those teams are well led, Rooms are heated, All of that back-end stuff and if I want to get people followed up so that I don't just give them a book and walk away but I actually walk with them, well, if I'm going to get lots of people professing faith converted, I'm going to need lots of people to walk with them. Who's going to make sure those people are arranged to walk with every new person and help them grow and deepen in their work? Someone needs to organise that. Well, I cannot see that that's businessification. That's just wise application of the stewardship of the resources we have. But someone needs to lead and manage it and put it all together and make it work.
Speaker 2:If the Lord blesses our churches and brings dozens more interested people to our congregations, what you would love to see is that every single one of those who comes gets personally mentored and cared for. Well, how is that going to happen? Only if someone pays attention to making sure every new person is personally cared for and mentored. Build a team, get a leader, get organised. So I think we often set friends against each other. The friends are personal, transformational, warm-hearted ministry and being organised. They're friends when done well together, but we often cast them as alternatives and enemies. We want to do ministry in a personal, warm-hearted, spiritual, transformating way. We ought not be organised. Therefore, the more organised we are, the less no, no, no, it can be. We can end up running church to be organised and efficient, and if that's the end, that's inappropriate. But if our end is personal transformation, spiritual work, one-to-one groups getting organised to facilitate, that's a good thing.
Speaker 1:As the church gets larger, organisation gets more important.
Speaker 2:Yes and no. In church context, where there's a people-rich environment and time-rich, you can be less organised. So our university contexts have been in the past, though I think things are changing. Our university contexts often don't need much leadership organisational, you know delegations, teams and so on because you can often capture a great crowd of students who are already pre-shaped to know how to handle a word and talk to others. When you go to suburbia you don't have people around as much, you don't have much time with them, and so you've got to work deeper. You've got to build teams with leaders and leaders to actually get more of the time. Poor people, poor environments, being more effective at the personal walking with transformation work, and so I think in certain contexts and it's not always small versus large, it's the kind of nature of the people work you're doing One of our challenges is moving a little bit off topic.
Speaker 2:One of our challenges is many of us trained in university contexts and we took the ministry practices we picked up in university context into suburbia without appreciating a lot of the ministry practices we endorsed. There were pragmatics, not principles. That is to say, the way you ran and developed groups of people doing people work was very much dependent on the cultural context you were in, which was a university setting. If you take those practices and move them into suburbia without recognising the vast differences between those environments, the pragmatic practices don't work in suburbia in the same kind of way, and so we've got to pay much more attention in suburbia to building teams, to working deep in leadership, organisational structures for the sake of getting more of the personal transformational work happening. But if we've got a culture that's setting an environment where being organised is the enemy of personal work, we've cut the legs out from under doing ministry in suburbia in a way that's effective and multiplying and can scale.
Speaker 1:And it's financially going to be viable and will be viable.
Speaker 2:So we've got lots of churches around our cities where partly it's a building issue. We've got lots of ministries where we cannot get to a certain size to be able to fund the multiplication and expansion of the work. So there are other realities coming in. If we're going to reach this country, you know we need to own the fact that we either need to see every church get much bigger or we need many, many more churches, or both, or both yeah. But what we're creating is a ministry climate where we're reticent to want churches to get bigger because somehow we've just determined that bigger church is bad. We don't want to be in big church because it's impersonal.
Speaker 1:And I notice we've dropped in the number of churches over 400 over the last decade.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, and I think there's a number of factors going on there. But if we add into that a kind of emotive reaction to getting bigger, we're effectively setting ourselves up with an impossible task. We won't be able to reach the country if we don't buy into the fact we need to grow our ministries and get them bigger. It's like saying I want to be fit as long as I don't have to do exercise.
Speaker 1:Do you know what I mean? And yet I can kind of hear people say, yeah, yeah, yeah. I kind of agree with you in principle. We need to be bigger, but I still want to know everyone.
Speaker 2:Well, and there is exactly the point. If I believe the church must be a place where I know everyone and the pastor knows everybody, we have built into our very ministry psyche the impossibility of reaching this country. What estimate is there of the number of people coming to our church? It's about weekly. It's about 3%, 4% or something like this. If we want to get to 5%, which in itself is a very unambitious goal, if we want to get to 5%, we need to double the size of every church or have twice as many. But if we have a culture that won't allow us to grow our churches in size, we've already preemptively decided we won't reach this country.
Speaker 1:So what do we need to do to undo that drop in number of bigger churches and what do we do to get bigger churches?
Speaker 2:Oh, there's a range of things. Always it's build the heat towards the need to reach this country at whatever the cost personally, not at the cost of the nature of the gospel and faithful gospel ministry, of course. But there are personal costs that we need to be ready to say let's buy into that for the sake of reaching this country, and that personal cost might include being in churches where I don't know everyone's name. We need to teach our leaders the realities of heaven and hell, you know, be captivated by the seriousness of the cause we're up against, but then skill them up in. How can I be a wise, skillful master builder? How can I learn to do ministry in a way that genuinely honours the nature of the gospel itself, has not given in to business practice as the key and the success in this, but is committed to scale, committed to growing, building and getting organised to achieve that end. There's many things to work on.
Speaker 1:What do you think's going on? I mean, I'm just thinking about this quiet revival in the UK that they're talking about and suddenly people oh God is giving growth. Where I'm just thinking about this quiet revival in the UK that they're talking about, and suddenly people oh God is giving growth. Where I'm doing nothing and people are running towards that rather than I need to be organised.
Speaker 2:I think there's a very important lesson that comes out of the 1700s, so it's the Whitfield-Wesley lesson. So Whitfield goes to the. There's a revival going on. There's a great revival. Whitfield goes to the fields and starts preaching. Tens and tens of thousands of people are coming to faith. He pours himself out to this cause, dies and much of what emerged. There's great ongoing impact, of course, but a lot of it fades. Wesley comes along behind him, probably not as gifted as a preacher, goes to the fields, preaches, sees much conversion and so on, but alongside of that sets up a class structure where he gets organised. He establishes small group ministry with a whole set of lessons and commands around what the leaders should be like and how they should perform, and there's a whole system of looking after it all.
Speaker 2:Wesley's ministry continued on for many, many years past Whitfield's Now, I guess. Again, I want to say, if we want to reach this country and the world, we need the both end, not to set them as enemies against each other. We need faithful, gospel-hearted preachers who are captivated by the love of Jesus, the reality of hell, and are sold out to the cause of the gospel, who will never compromise on those things. But we also need to get organised in a way that honours all of that, not in a way that gives over into business practice, in a way that undermines the very gospel. All of that's true. Thanks for coming in.
Speaker 1:Andrew Heard has been my guest. The Senior Pastor of EV Church on the Central Coast of New South Wales and also leader of the Reach Australia Movement. My name is Dominic Steele. You've been with us on the Pastor's Heart and we'll look forward to your company next tuesday afternoon.
