Efficient. Practical. How often we hear these words applied to ministry. This may reflect our desire to be wise stewards of what God has entrusted to us, or it may reflect the influence of a culture that values ROI (return on investment) above all else. Maybe both.
Scripture warns us about money. It is a tempting master, promising omnipotence—the power to control one’s life and circumstances. We all know stories of pastors lured into wealth’s maelstrom. We also know of ministries that mismanaged their finances and slowly disappeared beneath a tide of debt. Such tales keep church leaders vigilant. They provoke us to be efficient and practical, but might these values carry a hidden danger even more perilous than wealth?
When efficiency becomes a primary value, we’re tempted to become utilitarian. Rather than seeing people as inherently valuable, we rank them by their usefulness. We tap them for money, volunteer energy, or influence. As pastors our goal shifts from serving to using. From asking how we might love our people, to how we might leverage them. After all, isn’t it poor stewardship to have “high capacity” people in the pews and not utilize their wealth and leadership capacity for the church?
We condemn our culture for devaluing human life it deems useless—the unborn, the elderly, the mentally disabled—and yet the same utilitarian value of efficiency is also at work in the church. As ministers of Christ’s gospel, we must stand against the popular belief that everything and everyone must be useful. In his grace God has created some things not to be used but simply to behold. Sometimes we are the most godly when we are the most inefficient, even with our money.
This graceful, wasteful nature of God was revealed shortly before Jesus’ death. While he reclined at a banquet, a woman poured an expensive flask of oil over his feet. His disciples were appalled. Like many today, they could see only through the lens of practicality. “This ointment could have been sold for more than three hundred denarii and given to the poor,” they said rebuking the woman.
“Why do you bother her?” Jesus shot back. “She has done a beautiful thing to me.”
The disciples saw the spilled oil as lost opportunity. To them the oil was only a commodity to be exchanged for a measurable outcome. What they saw as waste, however, Jesus saw as priceless. He recognized the spilled oil as a beautiful gift. True worship seeks no return on investment. True worship is never a transaction. It is always a gift—an extravagant even if “wasteful” expression of love.
Perhaps our captivity to efficiency explains the dismissive posture many churches have toward the arts. Sure, we appreciate beautiful architecture, music, and paintings if they serve the practical goal of drawing people to our services. But art solely as an offering to God? Why would that be a good investment?
Artists who cultivate beauty provoke us to see the world differently—not simply as resources to be used, but as a gift to be received. The creative arts serve as a model of God’s grace. And how the church celebrates the arts is likely to impact its vision of God.
As Andy Crouch says, “If we have a utilitarian attitude toward art, if we require it to justify itself in terms of its usefulness to our ends … we will end up with the same attitude toward worship, and ultimately toward God.”
To combat the utilitarianism of our culture, and to foster a right vision of God, perhaps we must mute the voices of practicality as artists prophetically call us back to extravagant worship, to behold God rather than use him. And maybe it is good to embrace the impracticality of having young children, the mentally handicapped, and the “useless” in our worship gatherings as a way of valuing them and detoxifying ourselves. And perhaps the church should spend money on what the world deems impractical.
When the voices of efficiency cry out in protest, as they inevitably will, maybe the voice of Jesus will speak in defense of his precious, impractical bride: “Why do you bother her? She has done a beautiful thing to me.”
Skye Jethani is executive editor of Leadership Journal.
Copyright © 2013 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
