Our culture values instant gratification. We want the biggest, the fastest and the best, and we want it yesterday! Unfortunately, this mindset naturally flows into the way we do church. When a church is started we believe that explosive (or at least steady) growth needs to happen instantly or we will otherwise consider the church a failure. Few people consider, however, that a church can grow slowly and still be effective. What if the church took to heart the moral of the story of “The Tortoise and the Hare?”
In that story the setting is a race and the Hare is obviously the favorite to win because of his speed and quickness. The odds of the Tortoise winning were slim and none! However, the Hare failed to take into account the distance of the race. As expected, he got off to a quick start and built up a huge lead. Just as quick as he started he tired and had to rest. The tortoise by nature started very slowly, but never stopped. He knew the distance of the race. He knew the pace he could manage and he never gave up. As we all know, the tortoise ends up winning because his plan of attack was much better than the hare…slow, deliberate and effective.
What if the church took that approach? What if we were more concerned about the goal itself (expanding the Kingdom of Jesus Christ to the ends of the earth) than how good we look in the process? What if we were okay with focusing on the people the Lord has put right in front of us instead of trying to market to the masses? What if we made disciples a handful at a time instead of trying to mass produce disciples? People might think we are crazy. They might think we are ineffective. It may look like our strategy and our chances of success are slim and none, but in the end we will actually reach our goal.
It is interesting that Jesus took the approach of the Tortoise. He didn’t focus on the masses. He certainly had compassion on the multitudes, for the gospels say as much several times. In fact you find him ministering to the multitudes as much as he is able. While the multitudes were clamoring for Jesus’ attention, we often miss the example Jesus set by focusing his attention not on the multitudes but on 12 men…11 of whom would go on to have a bigger impact on human history for the cause of Christ than any other 11 men from all of history combined.
I’m not saying that marketing is all bad and the church should never use it as a strategy, but when we replace making disciples with running a rat race that we can’t finish, then we are wasting our time. There is no use running a race we cannot finish. Make no mistake. We MUST run the race and we MUST finish. How we run is as important that we run. We must take our God given strength, abilities and scope of influence into account and run the race he has given us the ability to run at the pace he has designed us to run.
