rusty cellar

Today I have been mulling over an interesting, but controversial point by Kallenberg. He offers a critique of current focus on effectiveness that churches and Christian ministries have been embracing. This word seems to be very much at home in the business world. But does it become a Trojan horse when transferred into the realm of ministry?

“One of the symptoms of our sinful condition is our tendency to imagine that it is our responsibility to make events turn out well. If we think it is our job to make history turn out all right, then we imagine that the relationship between our actions and the events around us is one of cause and effect. Consequently, we tend to measure our actions by the criterion of effectiveness. As any church-growth handbook will show, even those who serve others in ministry succumb to the ubiquitous pressure to evaluate their strategies precisely in terms of their effectiveness. This outlook is especially commonplace in our technological society; any account of scientific advancement is chiefly a tale of effective prediction, manipulation, and control of the outcomes.” (111)

Put in this light things look pretty bad. Strategic planning process becomes a means of prediction, manipulation, and control of outcome. What about a simple question, “What are our next steps?” Or what about “Where do we want to go next year?” Am I so entangled in the linguistic labyrinth constructed by Harvard Business School that the native tongue of the MBA graduate is the only dialect I know?

Kallenberg’s solution is attractive, but makes me wonder as what it would look like in practice,

“But there is an alternative way of viewing things. John Howard Yoder suggests that the relationship between the actions we take and eventual outcomes is one not of cause and effect but of death and resurrection. Instead of evaluating human actions on the basis of their utility, we can regard our actions as deeds capable of embodying and reflecting the form of Jesus’ story. We ought to measure our actions in terms of their faithfulness: do they faithfully reproduce the cruciform pattern of Jesus’ life and death and resurrection?” (112)

Myriads of questions flood my mind as I think about the implementation of this idea of measuring faithfulness. What is there to guard us from simple workaholism? Who determines what faithfulness looks like? What does resurrection look like in campus ministry or local church setting?