4. Less Satisfaction.
It never ceases to amaze me how much people love designing their own ministry models. (When someone can show them how.) It’s more of a job than a joy when you are running someone else’s playbook. Every time.
The bottom line is that photocopying another church’s model of ministry is much less enjoyable and exciting. There is a much deeper sense of “call satisfaction” and freedom to “be who you are” when you design your own.
And progress is always an immediate result when you do. You don’t work for Andy Stanley or Mike Breen. You work for the same God that called them and led them to design their own models. God will do the same for you.
5. Faulty Measurement.
Every ministry model, when operating well, will have clear inputs and outputs (means versus ends). For example, Andy Stanley’s strategy has environment “inputs” and faith catalyst “outputs.” Mike Breen has ministry vehicle “inputs” and life shape “outputs.”
Effective discipleship takes place when leaders are focused on the outputs in a way that frees them to adjust the inputs. But when you borrow a ministry model, it is much easier to focus only on the inputs.
The reason for this is twofold. First, in the desire to get the same attendance results as the ministry being copied, there is more of a preoccupation of “the how.” Second, “the how,” or the methodology itself, is much more “concrete” and measurable that the output of the methodology. Hence we tend to measure how many people “attend” what we are doing than the results that are coming from the attendance. Model makers are not as inclined to disconnect the means versus the ends of their model.
As one famous Christian educator said, “Beware of the ends-means inversion in ministry.”
