Jamin Bradley

There are countless books on the “right way to do church,” each with its own proven strategies and programs. While there’s nothing wrong with experimenting with other people’s ideas, there is likely nothing out there that will work perfectly to copy into your ministry. And if it does work perfectly for you, you may find yourself dreadfully unhappy because your ministry is no longer shaped like the image of God put on you and your community, but more like the image of God put on someone else and theirs.

Part of the reason you can’t fully copy and paste other people’s ministerial ideas onto your own church is that your context is different. You know your city and your people, and your favorite book does not. Some of these books also have little to teach us because of their unusual variables. For example, I remember reading a book on church planting in which the author mentioned he had one of the world’s most famous worship leaders on his staff at launch. I rolled my eyes and put the book down after reading that.

The best statement I ever heard about church growth at a church-planting conference came from a pastor whose name I can’t remember. I don’t think he’s well known, but he had been seeing enough traction in his church that he was asked to speak in a breakout at a huge event. What was his secret to success?

“We prayed,” he said. He explained that he always had to remind himself of how drastically his church entered into prayer, because now that he was getting attention, people might assume the growth was due to skill or a program. But his expansion was built around his church’s heart. In humility, he did not feel he had much more advice to offer us than the simple call to prayer and welcoming the people whom God sends in response.

Just because something worked for one church and not for yours doesn’t mean that you or your congregation screwed up. Remember that Jesus recognized that God’s wisdom would work differently among different people.

“For John the Baptist has come eating no bread and drinking no wine, and you say, ‘He has a demon.’ The Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, ‘Look at him! A glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’ Yet wisdom is justified by all her children.” (Luke 7:33-35).

Jesus recognized that God’s wisdom had manifested in John and himself in contrary ways. Yet when you look at the fruit of both John and Jesus’s ministry, it’s clear that God’s wisdom was at work in the differences. And so it may be that someone out there is running a church that is entirely different from yours but is making strides forward nonetheless. If the fruit and the deeds are there, then the Spirit is at work in some way, regardless of the differences.

That’s part of the problem with copying and pasting everyone else’s programs and methods onto your own church, ministry, pastoring, and unique image. It may very well be that the wisdom of God has a different plan for you and that you’re missing it by trying to be someone else. If Jesus tried to be like John the Baptist, we’d be left with a different gospel, for John’s personality and understanding of ministry were quite different from Jesus’s.

Don’t betray the wisdom of God in you to become the wisdom of God in someone else. Renew yourself to Jesus and then allow Jesus to move in the shape of you.