Excellent Ministry

this post is really for me to vent b/c I've spent the past two days at a retreat for clergy in the Oklahoma Conference of the United Methodist Church. The topic of the retreat is excellence in ministry, but I've heard very little on how to actually be excellent in a life of ministry. The reason for this is that when clergy hear the word "excellent" attached to their ministry, many seem to bristle up with either fear or frustration. This reaction is probably due to the way excellence has been defined, which is principally through numbers of people coming to worship and financial soundness of the church.

In response to this rigidity in defining excellence, this retreat has focused almost exclusively on simply being true to your self, which will lead to a ministry of excellence. I fail to see the connection. Granted, we have to be authentic to our own calling and our own gifts. And I get that our effectiveness in ministry cannot fully be measured through empirical evidence. But what we have done during these two days is to ignore the fact that we are an evangelical church. I don't mean evangelical in a political sense, but in the sense that whether we are liberal or conservative we are people who proclaim a message of hope found through Jesus Christ. Our mission, as defined by our Book of Discipline, is to "make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world." I hope that we can in some way measure if we are being effective in reaching this mission of our church. I can be true to self, but even more than that I hope that I have born fruit for the Kingdom. Fruit in changed lives, in more people hearing the good news, and in more people experiencing the fullness of life found in Christ.