The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
(Galatians 5:22)
Buds and blossoms are everywhere in our Diocese these days as congregations turn their hands to cultivating mission-edged ministry. Whether it is offering pedicures to women in shelters, hosting a survivors of suicide support group, offering free community meals, exploring faith through Alpha on Zoom or holding a games night for lonely neighbours, there is new life sprouting up all over the place.
This new season in Churchland flourishing means we are diversifying our ministry efforts. The term is blended ecology of ministry, meaning we continue our vibrant inherited/traditional church model (centered around Sunday worship) and also plant new varieties of missional church, sometimes called fresh expressions.
Similar to experimental gardening, when we are just starting out it is difficult to know how to cultivate new growth and to determine what has potential. How do we evaluate our efforts?
For generations (in Christendom) the so-called marks of success were based on numbers. We counted heads at worship, parishioner offerings and more recently, social media views. Our culture has a relentless pursuit of grading results. We humans (even Christians) are always measuring, counting, comparing and sometimes even competing. However, that is not the manner of God.
To be clear, it is not wrong to track average Sunday attendance and financial giving, but those metrics are only one small way of evaluating our ministries. Let’s face it, large congregations and large revenues do not necessarily equate to faithful discipleship. They are merely numbers that may indicate at least some form of vitality.
Emma Ineson, in her book, “Failure: What Jesus said about Sin, Mistakes and Messing Up,” says that missional growth is more difficult to identify, and it is much more likely to flounder.
“Without embracing the reality of failure in our plans and strategies, we are likely to become obsessed with goal setting, to aim for misguided ideas of what success looks like and to miss the opportunities for risk and innovation that come bundled up with the possibility of failure,” she said.
Ineson, Bishop to the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, writes, “We need to admit that numbers are too blunt an instrument for the kinds of small and fragile growth we might expect and look for when God begins to birth something new in uncertain times.”
So, how do we evaluate success (God’s way) in missional ministry? Shannon Kiser of Fresh Expressions US, offers us some help with these two guiding questions for lay and clergy leaders as we tend and grow missional initiatives:
- What might it look like to be faithful in this mission to which you have been called?
- What would be evidence of kingdom fruit in this mission?
For me, there are two absolute values and practices related to these questions and this work: prayer and active, others-first love. Those ingredients are required to be present and constantly tilled into all we do.
- Are you bathing your idea and/or missional initiative in prayer?
- Is your founding motive (why) and operational imperative other-oriented love?
If so, that is a great start.
In her experience planting new congregations (fresh expressions), Bishop Ineson says that beyond counting the new faces of people engaged in the faith community, the leaders wondered about spiritual growth. Are participants maturing in discipleship at all?
“How on earth do you measure ‘new Christians’?” she asked. “We began to experiment… with the idea of evaluating how people had grown or developed in their faith, whether they were starting ‘while they were far off’ or whether they’d been disciples all their lives and if their faith had grown, developed and matured.”
“We began to develop a means whereby, in the context of prayer and worship, people could, year on year, assess for themselves whether or not and how they had changed, or been changed, in the previous year; if they considered that they’d grown closer to God, they’d prayed more, read their Bible more or with greater understanding or differently, if they’d become more engaged with their local community, loved their neighbour better, become more confident about speaking about their faith with others. We tried to evaluate in terms of faithfulness and fruitfulness, not efficiency and effectiveness…”
As these fledgling, non-traditional faith gatherings evolved the leaders watched for the signs of Christ-like character. How are the Christian loving actions and messages taking root in the community? Saint Paul lists some of those traits in Galatians 5:22 – The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
There is no doubt that measuring faithfulness in ministry is nebulous. This is not the same as corporate strategic planning and calculating marketing outcomes. Then again, this is the upside-down Kingdom of God and the typical results of the movement of Jesus, this Way of Love.
Shannon Kiser explains, “Often, fresh expression work is slow, patient work. Remember, this is not about shuffling around members of other churches to come attend your fresh expression.” (That is called ‘transfer growth’ or ‘sheep stealing.’)
“It is coming alongside those who are currently disinterested or even skeptical about church and helping them to discover Christ in their midst,” she said. “That does not happen with a rigorous timeline, but rather with ongoing presence and faithfulness.”
Ultimately, mission (as compared to charity, as noble as that is) is about nurturing mutual, caring relationships with people beyond our existing congregations. Like Jesus, we turn outward to genuinely befriend those around us, sharing the gospel in deed and word.
Missional ministry is intentional and extremely organic, but there are also goals and direction for this work. Here are several reflective questions to help evaluate ministry flourishing and focus your efforts:
- Who did we serve and help this week individually?
- Who did we connect with and so learn more about the dreams and longings of the community this week?
- What is our reputation in the community? What are we hearing people say about us?
- When did we hear participants in our budding faith gathering sharing stories with each other about experiences in loving and serving the local community?
- When did we celebrate or lift up the value of being a blessing to our neighbourhood in our fresh expression gatherings?
- When and how did we pray for our community this week?
It is a good practice for church leaders to regularly meet and discuss these questions. Be sure to record these signs of (Christ) life, and then share these spiritual blossoms with other leaders and traditional Sunday congregation. There is nothing quite like hearing about how the Spirit is moving in our church to encourage the faithful and inspire support.
Celebrate the buds, blossoms and stories of spiritual fruit!
Rev. Canon Lisa G. Vaughn is the Diocesan Parish Vitality Coordinator. For additional articles, inspiration and insights on congregational vitality and mission see the Facebook page “Parish Vitality Coordinator – Diocese of NS & PEI”, and the Anglican Net News, “Six-Minute Study.”
