A Disciple-Making Movement in Your Churchნიმუში

The Expertise Myth (Excellent Execution = Excellent Ministry)

The second myth in ministry is the expertise myth, which assumes that excellent execution equals excellent ministry.

Take a moment to think about your last event planning session, or consider the last time you evaluated the success of an outreach or a program in your church. How did you measure its effectiveness?

Many churches gauge and celebrate the success of an event, outreach, or service by how well their staff executes it. The desire for excellent execution drives evaluation.

I’m not saying that offering excellent programs, events, or ministries is bad. Striving for ministry excellence is important, for Paul encouraged, “Whatever you do, do it from the heart, as something done for the Lord and not for people, knowing that you will receive the reward of an inheritance from the Lord” (Col. 3:23–24).

The question we need to ask is, “Is our definition of excellence correct?”

Every church offers a weekly event that the staff plans for and executes. The annual calendar is full of big events we ask people to sign up for. Sometimes the ministry calendar can feel overrun with events to execute, and the staff can feel like it moves from planning one event to the next.

When this happens, the staff often falls into the trap of elevating excellent execution as the most important thing. Since the next event is always coming, and since we want it to be better than the last, the staff can only trust the people who can execute the fastest and the best. Unfortunately, the only people who meet that criteria are often the staff members themselves.

The result is a small group of leaders who execute ministry while most of the church sits on the sidelines and watches. Since the standard of excellence is performance-based, only the top leaders do it well enough. No one else need apply.

But the problem with the expertise myth is that its standard of excellence is too limited. We don’t need to lower the bar of excellence; we just need to expand our definition. Jesus’s final words to us were not to go and make better events but to go and make mature disciples. And according to Ephesians 4, our role as church leaders is not to entertain the saints but to equip them. We fall into the expertise myth when excellence in our church is focused only on performance, not development.