The big problem in many evangelical and charismatic churches is that we have substituted success and impact for faithfulness and obedience. The fact is that Jesus never said we would have impact, he only told us to go and love people, sharing the gospel as we go. Whereas Jesus "wasted" time on lowly individuals who would never have any "impact" on their nations, the impact driven people only want to mix it with the beautiful, talented and successful. Jared at "Gospel Driven Church" writes:
Monday, March 23, 2009 The Trouble with "Impact!": The Vision of the VeggieTales Visionary Shaun Groves has an excellent post today called Phil Vischer's Jesus, sharing excerpts from Skye Jethani's book The Divine Commodity (which is on my must-get list). I hope Shaun won't mind if I reprint pretty much the whole thing. “The Christians my grandparents admired - D.L. Moody, R.G. LeTourneau, Bill Bright - were fantastically enterprising. The Rockefellers of the Christian world. Occasionally I would read about different sorts of Christians that would confuse me, like, say, Mother Teresa. Mother Teresa seemed like a great woman, but her approach struck me as highly inefficient. I mean, she was literally feeding the poor. One at a time. Didn’t she see that her impact would be much greater if she developed some sort of system for feeding the poor that could be franchised around the world? She could be the Ray Kroc of world hunger! Wouldn’t that be better?” After the financial collapse of Phil‘s company Big Idea Entertainment, makers of Veggie Tales, Phil explained the belief system that had driven him to make the motion picture that caused it all: “God would never call us from greater impact to lesser impact! Impact is everything! How many kids did you invite to Sunday school? How many souls have you won? How big is your church? How many videos/record/books have you sold? How many people will be in heaven because of your efforts? Impact, man!” He began questioning this belief system: “The more I dove into Scripture, the more I realized I had been deluded. I had grown up drinking a dangerous cocktail - a mix of the gospel, the Protestant work ethic, and the American dream… The Savior I was following seemed, in hindsight, equal parts Jesus, Ben Franklin, and Henry Ford. My Eternal value was rooted in what I could accomplish.” He eventually concluded that the Christian life “wasn’t about impact; it was about obedience.” Posted by Jared at 9:17 AM
The Gospel-Driven Church: The Trouble with "Impact!": The Vision of the VeggieTales Visionary
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