If we are honest with ourselves, such signs of really making a difference are very ambiguous. So also with the signs of institutional growth, although, sorry to say, this seems to provide a basis of confidence—or, conversely, a cause for despair—in many ministries. Institutional growth is the last refuge of ministries that are spiritually sterile. Anniversary sermons regularly point to statistical growth or to the new education wing as evidence that “God has richly blessed this ministry.” But the question that keeps erupting within us, as to whether our ministry really makes any difference, cannot be answered by reference to a debt-free “church plant”—to use the ugly term of the managerially minded.
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Our ministries are not liberated, and we cannot be signs of liberation to others, as long as we are captive to the criterion of effectiveness by which the world would bind us. By “the world” we mean in this instance what Paul describes as “the flesh.” The conflict is not, in the first place, between us who are the saved and others who are the unsaved…. The conflict is within ourselves; it is a conflict between living according to the flesh and living according to the Spirit. Nor is the struggle aimed at our achieving some decisive spiritual victory, although the military metaphor is frequently used in biblical and classical literature. The achievement involved, however, takes on a meaning quite different from our usual talk about achievements. It is always a matter of living out the gift already given. This is the heart of liberated and liberating ministry: to know that our ministry and the goal of our ministry are gifts. We do not need to sniff around the secular criterion of effectiveness in order to be assured that our ministries are legitimated. We and the work we have been given to do are already legitimated and justified by the grace of God. This is God’s sacramentum in Christ and the community he has called into being; it is the premise and the promise on which alone we can act in confidence.