Just Lucky!!

In his latest book, Jim Collins makes the point that great enterprises experience failure because they allow their success to create the feeling of invincibility - that they can do almost anything because of their superior product, service, experience, marketing etc.

He contrasted this kind of arrogance with the humility of great companies who stayed great. Toward the end of the chapter he noted that great companies who remained great had almost a paranoid sense that one of the key factors in their enduring success might be just plain luck. So they never drift into complacency or arrogance.

For years now I have longed for those who have experienced a great deal of success in their churches or ministries to have the courage to stand up at a conference and tell people how they did it. Give them all the principles and strategies to apply in their own ministries but then simply note that the reason for their success may have been because God just simply chose them (call it sovereignty or luck depending on your theological orientation) --allowed them to be the first ones to discover and implement strategies that worked (oftentimes it's the first ones in that grab the lions share of the positive results - other people who do the same things later don't often have the same success); sent them great people at just the right time (some leaders leave conferences trying to implement these great things they learn with only limited success and it's often because they just don't have the team around them to execute these amazing ideas - and no matter what the great leadership gurus tell us, it's not always that the key leader doesn't have the ability to attract them - sometimes we just get lucky/blessed/chosen)

So enough of the rambling - having worked at both a very large healthy church and a very small healthy church, I've seen that success (healthy growth, finances, staff etc) is way more about God's sovereignty than it is about my brilliant strategic plans, ministries and amazing sermons I preach. Thank God!!

And this doesn't excuse for one microsecond being lazy and apathetic.

So for now, we work hard, keep learning from everyone, pray like crazy and just hope (and pray) that God chooses to bless us - not because of how great we are but because of how great he is. And how he uses extremely unlikely people to bless so that at the end of the day, people will say, "THAT could only be done by God!!"