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Have you ever tried gardening? A number of years back my wife decided we should have a garden. So, we went and bought all the materials, dug up the ground and planted seeds – all the normal work you do to start a garden.
Then we began to water and pull weeds, every single day. Time went on for what felt like forever and it seemed like nothing was happening. There were no sprouts, no green, just boring dirt. It was around this time that I realized I wasn’t made for gardening.
I’m someone who wants to see the fruit of my labor right away. And a garden can be a lot of labor without the promise of results for quite some time. I didn’t just hate the waiting though, I hated everything about it.
Standing (or kneeling) in the hot sun for hours pulling weeds and having to remember to water and care for it each day was so tedious. In many ways, ministry can feel like this. If you’re like me, you want to see results as soon as possible.
[su_quote cite=””]Human nature always wants fast results and deep down we want to see progress because we want affirmation.[/su_quote]
Often we feel like success in ministry (much like success in our career) is a reflection of who we are and whether we are successful leaders. We’ve equated external growth with success.
When in reality the ministries that last long term and have the greatest success rates are the ones who have put in years of internal growth. They’ve done the watering and weeding to make sure the ministry will have deep enough roots to succeed when it takes off.
Let me clarify what I mean by internal and external growth. Internal growth is laying the groundwork, or roots. Often, this is the dirty work that is harder to appreciate. This is the kind of growth that you get by establishing good relationships with those in your ministry, discipling students, putting good systems in place, learning from others, planning events and prepping sermons.
Just as with plants, there is plenty that needs to go on below the surface before it can grow into a healthy and strong ministry that bears good fruit which is evident to any casual observer.
External growth is the fruit that is clearly evident to everyone else, but it only lasts when the work of internal growth has been done first. External growth is what people enjoy because it’s easy to know when it’s happening and it’s measurable. This is the growth that we see when our numbers go up, an event is successful, we launch a new initiative or people respond to an altar call.
It’s so easy to jump into our ministries and only focus on developing external growth. We can get obsessed with getting numbers at our meetings, drawing more people to our events or seeing the altar full.
I should quickly clarify something. I’m not against getting large numbers at our meetings and trying to draw as many people to our events as possible, but sometimes we have to pull back and focus on internal growth first. When we don’t have deep roots external growth doesn’t last. Students come to a meeting or an event and then they never come back.
[su_quote cite=””]People can sense when something is only surface level. Young adults are looking for a much more meaningful experience.[/su_quote]
I think Jesus is the perfect example of focusing on both internal and external growth. He focused on internal growth by pouring into and training His disciples. I’m sure that working with fishermen on a daily basis was not a glamorous job. But He also never turned anyone away and He drew incredibly large crowds (a miracle involving 5,000 people comes to mind). He also knew that by developing the disciples He would be able to reach thousands with the Gospel long after He went to heaven.
So, what am I getting at here? External growth seems sexy, but the summer is the perfect time to step back, evaluate your ministry and think about what types of internal growth you may have been neglecting. Maybe the best question to ask is, “in what areas do you need to grow deeper roots so that your ministry can support external growth when it happens?” Or, put another way, “what do we need to do better so we can retain more students?”
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