I flew into Orlando on a night of wild rain. My first glimpses of Florida were through the thick mesh screen of an exposed walkway four stories up an airport parking garage. The whipping palms and the ankle-deep water awash in the roadways below were surreal to my Northern eyes. I couldn't stop thinking of Jurassic Park. In theme-park mad Orlando, they'd named the garage's floors after cartoon animals. As the elevator opened, I noted that my destination was "elephant."
I had questions about the nature of ministry success and was curious what the two conferences would show me about it. I was in for a full week.
I was in town for the Exponential church planting conference—the first of two conferences I was slated for in a single week. The second was a local Epic Fail event near Chicago. My goals were to promote Leadership Journal, make friends, and find stories worth telling.
A busy week, to be sure—and one that plumbed the heights and depths of ministry. You'd be hard pressed to find two more wildly different ministry conferences. Exponential, the "largest gathering of church planters in the world," is a thousands-strong ministry conference with A-list speakers, flawless production, and tremendous energy. Epic Fail is intentionally the "anti-conference," small, rough around the edges, and focused, well, on dealing with failure in life and ministry.
I had questions about the nature of ministry success and was curious what the two conferences would show me about it. I was in for a full week.
Exponentially successful
First Baptist Church in Orlando looks like a well-manicured government compound. It's a huge scattering of concrete buildings and outdoor staircases sprawling over 130 acres. The property includes a pond, a historic chapel, lots of palm trees, and lots of parking. It's a tribute to any ministry conference that it could fill such a space, and Exponential filled it, with over 5,000 attendees (plus an estimated 40,000 tuning in via webcast—in 93 countries).
The scale and execution of the conference were impressive from the speakers list (Alan Hirsch, Francis Chan, Craig Groeschel just to pick three, plus solid "up-and-comers" like 3D's Jo Saxton) right down to the details of production and multimedia. It was all polished to a bright sheen.
Sitting in the auditorium taking notes for this piece during a plenary talk, I typed this description of how it all felt: Slick, polished, state-of-the-art, heartfelt. Exponential is the popular kid in the youth group, handsome, athletic, with clear skin, a good singing voice, and just enough 'struggles' to highlight how spiritually awesome they are.
That comes across more sarcastic on paper than I meant it to. I don't mean to make light of excellence—and Exponential is excellent—but it was tuned to such a fever pitch of perfection that the (literally) one time that I saw something go minorly awry during those three days—it was a brief microphone problem I think—the speaker pointed to it as an encouraging example that Exponential's organizers were, after all, human. Everyone laughed.
The conference is a big draw. I met people from Africa, Asia, and Europe, entire pastoral teams and planting core groups, ministers past, present, and future. There were seminarians of all ages, hip urban missionaries with "Macklemore" haircuts and blue-collar boutique work boots, burned-out past planters who hovered with ragged eyes among the booths, all collecting free pens and entering giveaways. There were people looking for questions. People looking for answers. People hawking answers in the form of books at $17.99. It was a din of overheard conversations. Buzzwords like "mission-minded," "strategic," "incarnational," "disciple-makers," and "embedded ministry," hummed about the stage and in the foyers.
"I love these people, but this feels wrong," my companion said. "It feels 'us and them.' It's all backwards. Like a celebrity cult."
Off the path that led from the main auditorium to the exhibit space, there was a small outbuilding—the speaker's lounge. Inside, you were gently scrutinized for an appropriate pass, and then able to mingle with the conference elite. Speakers mostly, plus spouses, friends, and media, milling around in the purple mood lighting near white modern furniture. A side table was deliciously catered with southwestern-style wraps and sandwiches. A barista in the far corner ground out shots of fair trade espresso.
I'd been kindly welcomed by one of Exponential's organizers, who went out of her way to give me introductions, space to record conversations, and a brief interview. Meetings with speakers took place in a "holy of holies" of sorts—a cleverly camouflaged interview space hidden at the back of the lounge. We had lovely conversations, encouraging snapshots of big trends and important ideas.
That first day, I met one fashionably dressed missiologist in the main building after a promotional video shoot. As we walked back through the crowd to chat in the inner sanctum, he sighed. Looking down the sidewalk, we saw the speaker's lounge surrounded by the "normal" people. They ate and talked on the grass or at scattered picnic tables, occasionally pointing at a well known face that came or went from the auditorium.
"I love these people, but this feels wrong," my companion said. "It feels 'us and them.' It's all backwards. Like a celebrity cult."
We stood for a moment, and then picked our way through the crowd. Several necks craned after us. We climbed the stairs into the dim-lit, murmuring lounge, then ducked still further beyond that into the interview space. It was quiet in there. We talked for a long time.
Epic Failings
Two days after I flew out of Orlando, I stepped onto our apartment's second-story back porch and looked out at the tail end of another rainstorm. It watered the bowed remains of last year's garden. The dead leaves were saturated.
I was tired after three days in Florida, and the thought of another conference irked me a little. But I zipped my coat against the downpour, walked down the slick steps, and drove a few miles through Chicagoland to the campus of Northern Seminary in Lombard, Illinois.
I didn't know what to expect from the Epic Fail event that I'd signed up for. We'd published a piece on Epic Fail before—a wonderful, honest article by founder J.R. Briggs. "How can pastors be encouraged to embrace their failures and redefine ministry success?" the deck asked. Briggs's own story includes no small measure of "success," especially in his early ministry years.
His story also includes what many would consider downward mobility. He left a church that wanted him to be "the next Andy Stanley," in favor of a ministry far less glamorous but true to his own spirit. And out of his disenchantment with the glitter-bomb dream of big-church "success," he started a conference to talk honestly about the bitter sides of ministry. Borrowing a name from the "Epic Fail" memes, it got strong online attention from pastors desperate for community to share hard questions, fears, and frustrations.
Briggs had opened his piece like this:
I've attended many pastors' conferences—and seen hundreds of advertisements promoting others. All of these events were geared around a definition of success that assumed that "bigger" and "more" were a pastor's goals. I pushed back from my desk after reading an ad for one such conference thinking, That's a lot of pressure for a pastor … I wondered if the ad's assumed definition of pastoral success was even accurate.
I was excited to see what was in store. The key points I remembered in the article were a confessional tone, a small gathering of struggling ministers in a non-prime location, and honesty. Lots of honesty. Even though I was going to a smaller local event than the slightly larger national conference, I expected something unusual.
And to be honest myself, I was nervous. I was going in a press capacity, but I had decided to engage the conference personally. I'm not currently in formal church ministry, but I consider myself a "grassroots pastor"—someone for whom pastoral work is a calling that finds expressions outside of a pulpit or a day job. I've also experienced disappointment and ministry failure, and have some shame associated with that. Familiar with the superficial "accountability groups" of many church cultures, I was wary about being asked to share "deepest and darkest" with strangers at a "failure" conference.
As I drove there, an imaginary scene played out in my mind. A spotlight focused on me in a crowded room while a speaker on stage smiled reassuringly. Tell us all how you've failed in your life, Paul, he says, motioning someone to give me a microphone. And make it … epic. I shuddered a little. Seeing the conference center, I flipped on my turn signal.
Never completely comfortable with either clocks or calendars, I had accidentally showed up an hour before registration. A minor failure to get me in the mood, I thought. Even when all the attendees had arrived, the parking lot looked empty. When the conference kicked off, there were around 20 people in the room, gathered at a few round tables. When you took out staff and a couple book editors there as flies on the wall, the number whittled down to somewhere around lucky 13. To call it intimate would be an understatement. But in spite of the intimate setting, the spotlight of my unpleasant daydream never materialized. I would have had to have worked to feel uncomfortable at all.
The agenda was simple. J.R. set the tone, we got to know one another, we heard stories from pastors struggling with failure in their personal lives, their faith, their ministries. The simplicity was striking and intentional. Though there were a couple "big names" present in the tiny group, the voices that we heard were one another's. One seminarian said he was there because he'd seen ministry burnouts, and feared that unless something changed, that career-defining failure would be his future too. We prayed, shared, talked. We heard stories of failures big and small. We contemplated art from Mandy, a pastor who had been profoundly impacted by an earlier Epic Fail event, and had ridden the bus from Ohio (paintings in tow) to join us and share her story.
It was tiny and rough around the edges. When we broke for lunch, we all piled into three cars and drove to eat burritos at the mall nearby. And seemingly without exception, it impacted every one of us. At the very end of our time, we shared the body and blood in large helpings. At no point did it feel manipulative or contrived. It was honest, cathartic, and powerful.
As I drove away after the event, I had the quiet inner exhaustion that comes after one has felt something deeply. The roads were still wet as I pulled from the campus onto Butterfield road, but the rain seemed like it was over.
What hath Orlando to do with Lombard?
So far as I know, my experience of attending two so different conferences in such close proximity is unique. They were about as far apart on the spectrum of ministry life as you can get. Heights and depths. Success and failure. The palms of Orlando, Florida, and the drooped lilacs of Lombard, Illinois.
One was exhausting in its exhilarating energy, the other so low key as to be occasionally awkward in the periodic silences. One was surrounded by world-class pleasure destinations, the other by the incessant Midwestern roadwork and shopping malls.
So, a voice in my mind prompts, which one was better?
The temptation for me here is to assign "rightness;" to say that Epic Fail was right in its simplicity, honesty, and unassuming rejection of celebrity. To unfairly dismiss Exponential's philosophy and execution by reason of its focus on ministry success and effectiveness. It's not that easy, though. There is a place for success. A place for polish, for high production value, for using an impressive stage to lever hearts and minds in Godward ways. After all, who wouldn't tune their instrument well when playing to please the Lord?
St. Paul famously wrote to the Philippians:
I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance, and need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me (ESV).
Some of us are natural successes at failure; others succeed at success. But perhaps what Paul is expressing is the need for Christ's under-shepherds to be facile at both. Without both experiences the secret strength of Christ in us remains hidden. I think this principle is as true for us in our corporate church life as it is for our individual spirituality. There's a place for exponential success and for epic failings.
But I suspect that we, like Paul, need to learn. To contemplate Christ the failure, Christ the abased one, the crushed, cold, defeated Christ of the tomb. To also contemplate the Christ who feasted, who was not above a triumphant entry.
I don't feel the need to unpack this too much—you're there already. Maybe in some past class or conversation you considered what factors make a ministry (or a life) "successful." You've probably wrestled with it too, torn between the realities that both the metrics you can see (size, polish, splash, the 40,000 clicks on a webcast) and the ones that you can't (faithfulness, honesty, deep relationship with God) can be taken as signs of life.
Some of us are natural successes at failure; others succeed at success. But perhaps what Paul is expressing is the need for Christ's under-shepherds to be facile at both.
My conference-heavy week showed me that the truth is tension. In the course of ministry there will be moments of success and failure—sometimes back to back.
In the end, I am disturbed when we value large and beautiful things too highly. I am fully convinced that we can nail successful church strategies and completely fail to see Christ in his weakness—the one who "has no beauty that we should consider him."
But with that said, there's not a one-size-fits-all philosophy of ministry. I had conversations at Exponential—by virtue of its size—that impacted me. I met far-flung people that I'm still in contact with. I was deeply encouraged by my conversations in that odd interview space. But I note one thing; the words that impacted me were not the ones under the bright lights or that everyone hashtagged furiously during the plenary sessions. They were the ones in quieter corners. Some of them came from big names and some did not, but I noticed one thing eerily Christlike: the people I felt were most worthy of the spotlight were the ones most obviously disenchanted with it.
Perhaps that—the hesitancy to be recognized, the desire to be merely another disciple at the feet of our teacher—is its own definition of success. If so, then the context may change, from spotlight to shadow and back again. Christ can speak in either, in the voices of those learning to humble themselves whether they abound or whether they are abased.
Briggs went on to write this in his article for us:
I need regular reminders of my call to faithfulness, not to success. How easily I forget what's important. I still have some major unlearning to do about identity, results, and ministry. I am not defined by what I do, but by who I am. Or, more importantly, to whom I belong.
And to whom do we belong? To one whose ministry included both the glory of the transfiguration and the desolation of Gethsemane. Both the fawning of Galilee and the angry mob at the Nazareth precipice. Both "success" and "failure."
Why would our own ministries look any different?
Paul Pastor is associate editor of Leadership Journal, a writer and grassroots pastor from Portland, Oregon.
Copyright © 2013 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
