Success and Church… what is it? What does it look like? What does is smell like, feel like, make you and me like? I wonder about these things… I dream about these things… but do we always understand this combination?
I Wonder….
I posted a blog a while back titled "My Church Group Attendance is Decreasing" where I found an article about a youth pastor who was concerned about his group attendance decreasing. This has stayed on my mind. So often we look at church success as having the most people, the most money, the best programs, and the most resources, but is this really success? What about the church that has 10… 20… 50 people, but they look like Jesus in their community. Their community recognizes Jesus without the "stuff" but in the people. Maybe, church success is different than what it has been believed to be. Maybe, we don’t need the latest and greatest, but in fact we already have it…. but we’re not using it.
What if we Reimagined Church…. Can we catch the dream again?
Do I have all the answers… No, but we can dream. Success and the church are one… because if we are really being the church, then we are being successful. If our communities see Jesus, in us… outside of Sunday 
then they have seen life to the full… That sounds like a success…
Lets talk…. and lets imagine again….
What do you think?
The greatest eye opener I have had in this past year is that even though I was working for a fairly big church as a student pastor and we probably had one of the largest youth groups in the area, there were still 31,000 teens in our community that didn’t know Jesus.
I asked myself these questions…
Are you building your kingdom or His?
Do I get bonus points because I have more students attending our ministry than any of the other student ministries in the area?
Is it about having numbers that makes me successful?
Can I honestly say I did the best I could to get the Gospel out to every student in our community?
I had to lay down my pride, forget about who is bigger and better and realize that we are one body and we all have the same mission "reaching the lost". I encourage you to get relationships going with other student ministeries from different churches in your area. Get some unity going, pray, worship and plan outreach events that will make an impact….imagine what you could do with 20 times the resources you have right now.
We just launched a Student Pastors Network in our area.