This is the third week we’re exploring the upcoming book, Emotionally Healthy Success: Measuring What Matters Most to Jesus by Pete Scazzero.[1] You can pre-order the book on Amazon and other platforms. In this inspiring work, Scazzero continues to emphasize how vital emotional health is for pastors, church leaders, members, and entire religious communities. I’ll never forget the first time I read Pete’s powerful words: “There are many people in the church who cannot be the disciple God calls them to be because they lack the emotional maturity to become mature disciples.” That moment truly changed my life and perspective on ministry. It helped me realize that his words resonate with many people I’ve known in the church—including myself.

When I was in seminary, a New Testament professor discussed the great reversals Jesus brought about in people’s lives and in the expectations of the people of God. The Beatitudes summarize the reversals Jesus instituted. God’s blessings, it turns out, are for the poor in heart, the poor in spirit, those who are hungry and thirsty for righteousness, and those who are persecuted. This week, we’re going to focus on how Jesus requires us to reverse our thinking about success if we are to receive the kind of success the gospel offers.

The reversals Jesus offers require us to accept that success includes suffering, vulnerability, a willingness to go unnoticed, sacrifice, servanthood, and, above all, humility. If we embrace the reversals of Jesus, we will need to adopt a different way of measuring success, a different scorecard, than the world around us. Unfortunately, the church, and perhaps particularly the Western evangelical church, has long been dominated by the values of achievement, control, size, and visible success. It really doesn’t matter what pastors preach from the pulpit if the lives they lead in the churches they build are grounded in values indistinguishable from those of corporate leaders with extremely talented staffs.

In order for us to change the secularization and worldliness of the contemporary church, we need four great rehearsals which Scazzero describes as follows:

1. From prayer for results to prayer for communion
2. From charisma to weakness and limits
3. From our best ideas to discerning God’s voice
4. From critical mass to critical yeast. [2]

From Prayer for Results to Prayer for Communion

Most pastors keep some form of prayer list. Unfortunately, studies have shown that many pastors rank prayer lower than other aspects of ministry, and many admit to having an inadequate prayer life. One study I read years ago found that pastors of larger congregations were especially likely to have an inadequate prayer life. Among Protestants, the problem is even worse. Protestants, with their historical skepticism of mystical religion, often underestimate the importance of communion with God compared with vocal or silent prayer. Among charismatics, there can be an emphasis on what used to be called “prayers of power.” I used to have a friend who ordered God to do a lot of things on the theory that this was the appropriate thing to do.

For me, the change came with exposure to Centering Prayer. For Scazzero, the change first came with his exposure to the Trappist monks:

The first gift came through exposure to Trappist monks who had dedicated their lives to prayer. Their commitment to silence and stillness as a means of surrendering their will to God’s will, along with their focus on listening to God more than talking to him, quietly unsettled me.[3]

The second change came through his study of and immersion in Jesus’ prayer life. Jesus, it turns out, made prayer a priority, and his first goal was simply to be in communion and constant fellowship with God. This is why the Father could say of the Son, “This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:17; Mark 1:11; Luke 3:21-22).

Communion, Clarity, and Direction

This, then, should be the first item in the scorecard of a Christian leader: Become a simple child of God, sitting at the Father’s feet, listening for wisdom, experiencing the Father’s love, and being content with the status of a beloved child of God. Unfortunately, too many Christian leaders drift slowly away from the Father’s feet, caught up in ceaseless activity on behalf of the Son, and, in the end, lose the power of the Holy Spirit.

Jesus withdrew to pray at decisive points in his ministry. He withdrew in order to renew his sense of purpose, discern the Will of God, and make important decisions, such as choosing his disciples.[4] When I’ve faced difficult decisions as an administrator, I’ve found that taking time to pray quietly can be incredibly helpful. Over the years, through many successes and setbacks, I’ve learned to rely on silent prayer in challenging moments. Sometimes it may seem like a waste of time, but I’ve discovered that this quiet time often brings a deep sense of guidance. After praying, I might not hear a clear voice, but I do feel a nudge toward certain actions. Once I follow that lead, I often feel assured that I am aligned with God’s will. I believe that for every Christian leader, pausing for listening prayer is a vital way to connect with God and find clarity in making good decisions.

Prayer and Power

One primary delusion in our society concerns power and its ability to force others to adopt our way of thinking, acting, and believing. This is a kind of power that Christian leaders must reject. However, there is another kind of power that Christian leaders receive when they make prayer their first priority. It is not the overt power the world worships. It is a quiet power that reveals itself in weakness, servanthood, occasional suffering, and even failure. Here is how Scazzero makes the point:

Prayer is where we, too, receive power. Not the power to make things happen on our terms, but the strength to persevere, wait, obey, and stay faithful through testing and setbacks. No strategy or support system can give us that. Only God can.[5]

One of the most challenging times I faced in ministry was dealing with a staff member at a large church who had committed financial wrongdoing. Even though I was trained as a lawyer and had years of experience as a senior pastor, this issue, along with others I was handling at the time, felt overwhelming. It quickly became clear that I needed to meet with the church leadership responsible for finance. I spent twenty minutes alone in my office, praying for God’s mercy and wisdom. After that, I picked up my pen and quickly listed ten steps essential to address the problem. I’m not sure how long it would have taken me to come up with that on my own, but I was confident that God had granted me the wisdom to identify the first important steps needed to resolve the situation. The group met just before noon, and by 1:00 in the afternoon, the church’s lay leadership had taken charge of the problem.

Abandoning the False Lure of Charisma

Another false scorecard item pastors are tempted to believe is that extreme charisma is a sign of spiritual power and sound decision-making. Anyone who pays attention to the dramatic failures of popular, visible charismatic Christian leaders should realize this is false. Charisma, as our society counts it, is a rare combination of physical, emotional, personal, and other characteristics that gives a person the power to get others to do what they want. As pastors, we are not seeking that kind of power. We are seeking the power to do God’s will.

Interestingly, this insight isn’t just for religious professionals. When Jim Collins wrote his book Good to Great, he found that the most impactful changes in organizations weren’t led by charismatic leaders. Instead, they came from individuals who genuinely prioritized the organization, its employees, and its customers, always humbly serving the company’s best interests above all.[6]

Discerning God’s Will

During the 1990s, at the height of the Mega-Church movement, many pastors attended large conferences where pastors from very large churches urged them to imitate those churches’ leadership, worship, programming, and other practices as a key to success. More than one returned to his local church, attempted to implement changes, and failed miserably, sometimes ending his ministry.

A third problem with using the wrong scorecard and refusing to follow the humble path of Jesus is substituting one’s own will for that of some celebrity leader concerning what God wants from a particular local congregation. Discerning God’s will means slowing down, refusing to act impetuously, listening carefully to God and others, and then acting. It also means recognizing the limits of a particular church, a particular situation, and most importantly the limits of a particular leader. This means we must slow down, surrender control to God, and listen for God to direct our steps.[7]

Nothing is more indicative of an immature leader than an unwillingness to slow down, surrender control, embrace humility, and listen carefully to God and others. This means we must abandon the notion, so common in America and in the media, that leadership is primarily about being decisive, quick to act, and uncompromising. The truth is that the best leaders listen to everyone with humility, take whatever time is necessary to make a good decision, and are more than willing to compromise, change direction, or even abandon a course of action if it turns out to be outside God’s will.

As one inclined to embrace a worldly vision of leadership and the character of a worldly leader, I can testify that nothing is more spiritually liberating than giving up the false ideal so common in our culture, the leader as master of everything. There is a wonderful freedom in submitting ourselves to God, to those God has brought around us as leaders, to the limits God has placed on us and those around us, and to the tendency to overreact out of fear or anxiety. All these things distort our decision-making and prevent us from making the best decision in God’s world.[8]

An Ignatian Moment

Pete Scazzero directs our attention to Ignatius of Loyola’s insight that we need to reach a point of “indifference” in our prayer life and decision-making to make good decisions. In summary, we need to listen to God in the movement of God, not just in our minds, but also in our Will and emotions as we make decisions. What we are waiting for is the moment when we want God’s will more than anything else and, so to speak, are indifferent to the worldly consequences of the answer to our prayer. In other words, when making decisions, leaders should feel that they, their organization, and the people closest to them will be drawn closer to God by the decision. This kind of decision-making takes time.

From Numbers to Discipleship of Future Leaders

One important discovery a Christian pastor or other leader can make is that the number of followers is less important than their quality. Success depends not on the actions of a large number of people, though many may be involved in the end, but on the actions of a few people who do the right things at the right time and in the right place. Christian leaders need to remember that, while Jesus did speak to large crowds, he focused his attention on a relatively small number of people who would carry his ministry to the ends of the Earth. Skipping personal discipleship with small groups deprives Christian leaders of their greatest potential for impact.[9]

Conclusion

By now, it should be clear that Jesus calls Christian leaders to a different kind of leadership and a different measure of success than the world elevates. In recent years, my wife and I have primarily attended relatively small congregations. Some were new church plants; others were ancient churches led by priests. One thing I have appreciated learning is that the best church leaders are personally humble, love their congregation, get close to members, act carefully and wisely, and try to imitate Christ.

Becoming this kind of a leader requires adjustment. Here’s how Scazzzero puts it in Emotionally Healthy Success:

Jesus is not asking us to make small adjustments to our leadership. He is inviting us to stop playing the old success game entirely— to step out of the world of scale, hurry, worldly influence, comparison, and visibility— so we can learn a new way of seeing what truly matters.[10]

Next week, I will move on to the kinds of changes that Christian leaders and others need to make to become leaders like Jesus who focus on what truly and eternally matters.

Copyright 2026, G. Christopher Scruggs, All Rights Reserved

[1] Pete Scazzero, Emotionally Healthy Success: Measuring What Matters Most to Jesus  (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2026. The blogs in this series are inspired by this book. I was given the opportunity to review an advance copy of the book, which I recommend to interested readers.

[2] Id, 57.

[3] Id, 58-59.

[4] Id, 62.

[5] Id, 63.

[6] Jim Collins, Good to Great (New York, NY: HarperBusiness, 2001).

[7] Emotionally Healthy Success, 71.

[8] Id.

[9] Id, 76.

[10] Id, 79.

 

This is the second week of an examination a toon o be released book, Emotionally Healthy Success: Measuring What Matters Most to Jesus by Pete Scazzero.^[1] One endearing characteristic of Pete Scazzero’s writings is the winsome honesty and self-disclosure that permeate his work. He’s not afraid to admit his own failures. I remember reading The Emotionally Healthy Church, the first of his books I read, and being touched by his admission of personal and pastoral failures, some of which I shared, and his willingness to share them.[2]

I wouldn’t want to take anything away from people reading his story for themselves, but I will share just enough to show that when he was a younger pastor, he was captured by a common evangelical desire to build a growing, thriving, and successful church. At some point along the way, a series of crises forced him to face the fact that he did not have the emotional health to be the kind of leader he wanted to be. The result was the creation of what is now Emotionally Healthy Discipleship. The church of Jesus Christ is better off because Pete Scazzero was willing to look at himself and see his own failures.

The False Metrics (Scorecard) We Create for Ourselves

Pete, like many of us, sometimes found himself comparing himself to other church leaders who seemed more successful. Such comparisons often brought him down rather than lifting him up. He might think, “I’m not a strong enough leader,” worry that his church isn’t growing quickly enough, or feel discouraged because people aren’t responding as he hoped. These negative thoughts can become endless and harmful because we often carry unhealthy scripts about what success should look like—scripts based on false ideas about our ministries and lives. Here are just a few of those misleading messages: ^[3]

1. I make too many mistakes and fail too often, violating the false metric that requires me to avoid mistakes.
2. I sometimes upset people or hurt their feelings, violating the false metric that people should always respond positively to my ministry.
3. I sometimes fail to meet people’s expectations, violating the false metric that one should always say yes to and meet other people’s expressed needs.
4. I don’t always get things right, violating the false metric that I must be right all the time.
5. Not everyone likes me or supports my ministry, violating the false metric that I should be liked and approved of by everyone.
6. My decisions sometimes result in conflict, violating the false metric that requires successful leaders to avoid conflict.
7. I am not always productive and thereby violate the false metric that a leader should accomplish a lot and work productively all the time.
8. I have physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, and other weaknesses and thereby violate the false metric that I must not be weak or needy.
9. There are limits to my knowledge and experience, and I constantly fail the false metric that requires me to know more than everyone else.
10. There are times when I fail to put others first and meet my own needs, violating the false metric that requires me to make my personal life secondary.
11. There are times when I show anger, sadness, disappointment, and other emotions, violating the false metric that requires not to showing or expressing true feelings.
12. When I look around at others in my position, I recognize that I am just not good enough.

These internal narratives, the metrics they imply, and many others we could create are misleading and often false. In some cases, they lead us to be untrue to ourselves, our real needs, and the people who rely on us. As we internalize these false ideas, we create an “internal scorecard” we use to measure our success—a scorecard that can be deeply damaging.

The Problem with False Metrics (Bad Scorecard)

The problem with misleading metrics is straightforward: neither we nor anyone we know can truly meet them. If we try, failure is almost certain. For a long time in both my careers, I held a misguided notion of success that pushed me to be someone I wasn’t—someone smarter, stronger, tougher, more ruthless, and more daring than I was created to be. Unsurprisingly, I didn’t succeed. More damaging, failure deeply ingrained those false standards into my personality, resulting in obsessive workaholism. It took many years to finally let go and move forward.

Pete Scazzero puts it this way:

The weight of living up to all these scorecards is crushing. To keep everyone satisfied, to keep approval levels high and productivity up, we push ourselves far beyond what we can humanly sustain.^[4]

For a few years, our church compared itself to another congregation, a nearby mega-church that was part of a larger mega-church movement. We made our plans and set goals on the assumption that we should attempt to be like that church. We constantly fell short of our unrealistic goals. Finally, our Director of Christian Education, a wonderful person and good friend, advised senior leadership to stop imitating this other church and stop judging our success by its standard. She concluded with, “We just need to be who we are.”

It was one of the most liberating moments of my professional life. It was the first time it occurred to me that I did not always have to strive for our congregation to be bigger, better programmed, with a bigger facility and a larger budget. We could simply be who God created us to be. Most importantly, we could remain the community-centered church we had always been, without striving to become a more corporate congregation.

Social Status and False Scorecards

There was a time in America when pastors were held in high esteem. In particular, pastors of large mainline churches were highly respected members of local communities. When I was young, I was privileged to experience this phenomenon. The church my wife and I attended was prominent, and our pastor was a highly respected figure in a very large city. Unfortunately, the decline of Christian faith in America and a series of high-profile scandals have almost eliminated this phenomenon. It is rare today for a pastor to be seen as socially important.

One notable outcome of this phenomenon is that some pastors try to imitate successful leaders from the worlds of business or government, not only in how they lead but also in how they live as Christian mentors. For example, in one community where Kathy and I lived, there was a prominent pastor who never called himself a pastor. Instead, he sometimes referred to himself as a “religious businessman.” I believe this reflected a heartfelt desire to belong to a respected profession that offers social status and recognition. I don’t think there’s anything particularly wrong with wanting to be seen as a community leader, but unquestioningly emulating the values, objectives, organizational structures, and other aspects of business and government is problematic.

When he was a young man, the German theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a doctoral thesis in which he argued that the church was a visible social organization as well as a visible spiritual one.[5] He persuasively argued that the sacred community of the church could not be reduced to the categories applicable to other social organizations. This is a point all pastors need to internalize: As a church, we share certain characteristics with other social organizations and must be managed efficiently, just as they are. As I sometimes used to tell some of our staff, “We have to pay the light bill just like everyone else.” On the other hand, the church is a spiritual organization, and we cannot always lead it in accordance with the values of a secular society. This can be hard for some people to understand. I’ve had to explain to successful businesspeople who were elders in a local congregation that a strategy successful in a business context simply could not be used in our local congregation.

When we use metrics developed for business or other social organizations, we risk being unfaithful to Christ. In the same way, when we ultimately use the ministry of Christ to achieve for ourselves the same order of secular objectives that motivate secular leaders, we are almost certainly victims of a false metric and are measuring our ministry inadequately. This is particularly true when physical or fiscal size (members and budgets) becomes our most important metric. In the end, behind all the metrics ministries use to measure success, the fundamental question remains: “How good a job am I doing and our organization doing, in making more and better disciples for Christ?”^[6] Numbers can hide the spiritual reality that nothing important is happening in a church and in the spiritual lives of its members.

The Consequences of Inadequate or False Goals

Most parents encourage their children to learn to make good decisions. We spend so much time educating and training our children and trying to model a healthy lifestyle for them because we want them to make good decisions and lead happy, meaningful lives. A life characterized by bad decisions is never a happy one. The same is true for leaders as individuals and for the organizations they lead. Bad decisions have bad consequences. A bad notion of success leads to bad decisions, personal and otherwise.

When we adopt a false metric and therefore judge ourselves, others, and the organizations we participate in in a false or inadequate way, we open the door to suffering. When a pastor or other leader embraces a false scorecard, the results harm that person, those closest to us, and the cause of Christ.

There are certain signs that we have adopted a false scorecard and are harming ourselves, including the tendency to work beyond physical, emotional, and spiritual limits, constant overwork, feelings of inadequacy because one is not accomplishing enough, and constant comparison with others. Unfortunately, I have known many pastors who experience these feelings, including myself a good bit of the time.

When we act in this way, it can influence those around us, encouraging a similar behavior. For leaders, this might mean setting a standard that pushes everyone beyond what they thought was possible. While this can sometimes lead to personal challenges, it’s important to remember that pushing ourselves too hard can also affect our relationships with loved ones—family and friends—impacting the emotional bonds we cherish most.

Finally, when we push ourselves beyond our natural limits and live alienated from our own emotional well-being, we do violence to the cause of Christ. Over and over again, Scazzero points out that the most important changes people make occur slowly. Hurry, rush, and anxiety work against the slow work God intends to do in transforming our lives and the lives of those we have been called to serve. The mission we have been called to undertake becomes distorted and diverted from God’s fundamental purpose.

I’ve had the opportunity to help turn around more than one church. One of my personal failures has been to focus on structural flaws in the organization rather than on personally discipling people. When I look back on some of my successes that have not endured, I realize the failure was not growing the people, but trying to fix problems. God primarily calls pastors to disciple people, not to fix organizational charts or personnel problems. (This does not mean that fixing structural problems is unimportant.)

Scazzero describes the phenomenon as follows:

We do violence to God’s work whenever we rush ahead to do for God what he has not asked us to do. When we act for God without listening to God, we misuse our authority, distort priorities, and carry responsibilities God never entrusted to us. This is not a new pattern. Jesus’s disciples constantly succumbed to the temptation to take charge for God.[7]

The disciples, in many ways, misunderstood Jesus’s personal and communal messianic mission to transform lives. They hoped for something better: a politically and administratively reorganized Israel with them at the head. We can fall into the same way of thinking. We can fall into the habit of believing that because our church is growing, we’re doing God’s will. We can fall into the habit of thinking that because people praise our preaching, we’re doing God’s will. We can fall into the habit of thinking that because giving is increasing over the year, we’re doing God’s will. That may be the case, but it’s not necessarily the case.

When a church and its leadership embrace a false notion of success, there can be highly visible programs, a lot of activity, plenty of volunteers, and many indicators of health, while all along, under the surface, things are not good. Scazzero describes his experience as follows:

People under my leadership grew in areas that were visible–skills, knowledge, gift development— but not in the deeper places that actually change a person. We recycled the same problems year after year: defensiveness, poor conflict management skills, emotional reactivity. Significant parts of people’s lives remained untouched.[8]

My first pastorate was in a small church in a poor community that had experienced many years of decline. It was a small church, and so I was able to get personally involved in the life of many people. In particular, there was one young leader, about forty, with whom I became friends almost immediately. We spent a lot of time together. He was in a Bible study with me. He was in an accountability group with me. We began a men’s ministry which he led, and in which I participated. Interestingly, the five years we spent together were very productive for him and for me. That Bible study we started continues to this very day, thirty-five years later. He is still a leader in the church. He’s discipled other leaders in the church since I left. I can’t say this about every church I served. Devoting time to people is the most important thing a leader can do.

Don’t Play the Success Game

The most important takeaway from this blog is that we need to avoid judging our personal or ministry success by the standards of our society or secondary organizations. In Pete Scazzero’s terms, we need to refuse to play the success game. This does not mean we become isolated, highly spiritual, and entirely different people to whom normal people cannot relate. The reverse is true. We need to become whole people with whom people can easily relate. Next week, we’re going to talk about how we go about that difficult process.

Copyright 2026, G. Christopher Scruggs, All Rights Reserved

^[1] Pete Scazzero, Emotionally Healthy Success: Measuring What Matters Most to Jesus  (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2026. This, the last and the remaining blogs in this series are inspired by this book. I was given the opportunity to review an advance copy of the book, which I recommend to interested readers.

[2] Peter Scazzero, The Emotionally Healthy Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2003, 2010). His other books include Peter Scazzero, Emotionally Healthy Discipleship: Moving from Shallow Christianity to Deep Transformation (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2021). For those who wish to read all of his books, see Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, updated ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2017), and The Emotionally Healthy Leader: How Transforming your Inner Life will Deeply Transform your Church, Team, and World (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2017).

^[3] Emotionally Healthy Success, 32-33. I have taken some liberty with the actual list Scazzero outlines to make it more personal to readers and to extend its meanings.

^[4] Emotionally Healthy Success, 33.

[5] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio: A Theological Study of the Sociology of the Church (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1998).

^[6] “Making More and Better Disciples for Christ” was the motto of my first church. It was not a large congregation, but at some point it was widely seen as very active and productive in its area. The focus on discipleship allowed the development of leaders, some of whom are still active today.

[7] Emotionally Healthy Success, 46.

[8] Id, 48.

This week, I am shifting from political philosophy to discipleship, returning to a theme that has been the subject of many past essays. For the next few weeks, I am going to take a leisurely walk through a book that will be released in the next few months, Emotionally Healthy Success: Measuring What Matters Most to Jesus by Pete Scazzero.^[1] This book is in the final stages of publication. I was given the rare privilege of reading an advance copy. Readers can order the book in preorder on numerous websites, including Amazon. There may be some changes between the text that read and the final product. The Emotionally Healthy website is https://www.emotionallyhealthy.org/.

In Emotionally Healthy Success, Pete is reaching out religious leaders with an important message—and one that is especially needed within the contemporary evangelical movement. The message is simple: For the contemporary church in the West and those impacted by American culture to recover spiritual and emotional health, spiritual values and disciplines that have been ruled secondary since the Reformation need to be recovered by the contemporary church.[2]

Pete Scazzero and his Ministry.

For many years, Pete Scazzero has been helping pastors and church leaders escape the shallowness of the American church and focus on deeper issues of emotional and spiritual health in the local church and among church members and leaders. Through his ministry, he has impacted many church members and leaders, including me.

Nearly a decade ago, I was asked to help a troubled congregation restore itself to health. One of the associate pastors pointed me to Pete’s book, The Emotionally Healthy Leader, and suggested I read it. Within weeks, one of our children reported to me that her Anglican congregation was reading The Emotionally Healthy Church together. Eventually, I read both books, then everything that Pete has written. Kathy and I participated in and later taught Emotionally Healthy Spirituality and Relationships in local congregations. Over time, his message began to sink into my soul and changed not just my life and ministry, but our family as well.

Pete’s ministry has included planting and pastoring a growing church, facing the pressures and challenges of the contemporary pastorate, confronting his own weaknesses, writing books on the importance of emotional health in congregations, and, more recently, coaching and consulting with congregations of all shapes and sizes. One question he is constantly asked is, “Pete, how exactly do I know if I am succeeding or failing?”

False Metrics

The mere fact that this question is asked so frequently (and I have asked it myself) should alert us to a big problem in American Christianity: We are captured by the materialistic success orientation of our culture. We don’t ask, as I think the Apostle Paul would have asked, “Am I following Christ and sharing his love with others?” We ask, “Am I succeeding?” In Pete’s case, he pondered the answer to that question and came to the conclusion that he needed to change. In the process of looking at his own inner life, he concluded that American church leaders are confused about the meaning of their ministry because we often use the wrong metric to judge our success and failure.

From the time I began my ministry, I looked at some metrics every week. The metrics I looked at included how many people attended worship that week, the collections for the week, how many people attended Bible studies, Sunday School, and other discipleship events, and the like. My list was pretty long. I have friends for whom the list ended with the number of people in worship. I’ve also known people who abandoned their ministry when they didn’t see dramatic growth in attendance or even a small decline. This focus on metrics eventually turns into a kind of mania. “If my church grew by 10% last year, it should grow by 10% every year. In fact, it should grow by more than 10%. I should be doing better and better every year.”

Fortunately, during my first pastorate in a very small church, our church actually grew by about 10% a year; one year it grew about 30% and then returned to a slower growth rate. Years later, when I was called to a new pastorate, I looked at the issue of who dropped out of our fellowship. Guess what I found? I discovered that the greatest dropout rate among members was among those who joined during the years we grew fastest. That 30% year was the case in point. Our little church was simply incapable of nurturing a third more people each year. My focus on growth had not worked. From that point forward, I realized that there was something fundamentally wrong with the way I was judging success. I made every effort not to let growth metrics control my ministry or our church’s ministry.

The problem of false metrics is not limited to church leaders. I have been a lawyer involved in business, as well as a pastor, throughout my professional career. The problem of false metrics for success is always with us in any profession. In any profession, false metrics often reflect a need for personal approval. In business, they often involve a need for financial gain. In government, false metrics involve power and position in a bureaucracy. The problem is the same: We fall into the habit of comparing ourselves to others we feel have experienced greater success, as measured by the metric we are using.

Why False Metrics Matter

When I was a young lawyer, I was assigned to help a businessman clean up a failed investment. It was an interesting experience. To sell what remained of the business, we had to continue operating it for many months. In the process, we found that the former managers continually compared themselves to the largest company in the industry, which made an expensive product. To gain market share, the company cut prices, resulting in massive losses during a recession. We, on the other hand, bid whatever it took to make a profit, because we were going to sell the company anyway. We got every contract we bid on. Why? Because, in fact, the company was the second choice for most customers, who only gave us the contract if our larger competitor was unable to fill the order. In other words, we could bid much higher because we were meeting an urgent need. Using a false metric drove the company into an unnecessary bankruptcy. Once we understood that fact, we were able to restore the company to profitability.

The lesson? False metrics matter, and recognizing that we are using a false metric is the first step toward renewed health, whether in business, government, non-profits, the church, or one’s personal life.

We live in a culture obsessed with false metrics. Our false metrics are often a version of size matters. But there are other false metrics—power matters, position matters, personal pleasure matters, getting what I want matters, being right matters—the list is pretty long. The problem with false metrics is that they result in failure and pain. The pain is felt by everyone: the person who uses the false metrics, their family, children, neighborhoods, church, cities, even the nation as a whole. False metrics create suffering. We are surrounded daily by the consequences of living according to false metrics and a false narrative of what a truly blessed life requires. The ruins lie all around us in the form of broken families, neglected children, alienated employees, troubled churches, and a host of other signs that something is deeply wrong in our culture.

The church is not immune to false metrics. I have been a pastor for a long time. I have been to many meetings of pastors, local groups, denominations, and large training events. Almost inevitably, the first question pastors ask each other is, “How large is your church?”  The most pervasive metric in today’s evangelical movement is size. Size = success is a false metric.  Interestingly, based on this metric, Jesus was a failure.

During his ministry, he attracted crowds, but at the end of his life he was completely alone. He had twelve close colleagues who deserted him, and a larger group that did the same. Jesus, however, did not think that size was what mattered. He also did not think that financial security, a large home, and a host of other things we view as signs of success were important. He thought having a relationship with God, whom he called “Father,” was important. Success was being a faithful son of the Father.

The night before he was executed by the successful and powerful people in his culture, he asked that the fate allotted to him not be required, but in the end, he accepted his destiny with a calm, “Not my will but Thy will be done.” His metric for success had nothing to do with success, money, position, power, pleasure, or fame. It had to do with carrying out the will of the Father in constant, unbroken communion with God. In the eyes of the world, he would be seen as a failure. In the eyes of God, the Beloved Son had achieved the greatest success the world had ever seen or would ever see—a victory over evil, sin, and eventually death.

False Metrics Lead to False Comparison

If we use a false metric to judge ourselves, our families, our professions, or our churches, we inevitably end up comparing ourselves to others. Pete Scazzero puts it this way:

Comparison with others is a unique kind of self-torture. What begins as a glance sideways often grows into something far more dangerous: envy and covetousness. Comparison says, “How am I doing?” Envy whispers, “I’m not enough unless I have what they have.” It is the voice that says, “I’ll be happy when our church reaches two hundred or five hundred.” “I’ll be content when we finally have our own building or are debt-free.” “I’ll feel so much better when we have a bigger youth ministry or a second campus.” This struggle with comparison isn’t new. It’s a dynamic that appears repeatedly in Scripture.^[3]

The Bible is full of stories about people and nations that had a false ideal that led to destruction and death. Israel wanted to be like all the nations that surrounded them, and the result was a series of failed kings, division, and finally enslavement in Babylon. Saul wanted the adulation of the people more than faithfulness to God, and the result was the loss of God’s favor and eventually the loss of his kingdom and life. David wanted the pleasure of being with Bathsheba more than obedience to the law, and the result was suffering for his family and nation. When Jesus arrived, the leaders of the people valued the continuation of their comfortable way of life more than the recognition of the unexpected Messiah they had been given by God.

I wish I could look back on my own professional career without regret for having followed false metrics and the damage they caused. But the facts are otherwise. When we discover that we have been captured by a false ideal of success, the best thing we can do is recognize it, repent of it, and live beyond its control as we do the best we can to undo the damage and suffering it has caused.

Conclusion

The good news is that God is merciful and we can move beyond our cultural captivities to false ideals and notions of success. In the process, we find our true selves and the joy of using our best talents, be they large or modest, in the way God has intended. In my experience, undoing the consequences is never swift, easy, or complete, but there is real healing. In this world, real healing, personal and social, is both important and enough.

At least to this point in my Christian walk and as a Christian leader, I have not accomplished all I hoped and dreamed of. Along the way, there have been failures and shortcomings. There has also been mercy and undeserved success. One of the great mercies has been the discovery of Pete Scazzero’s writings and the Emotionally Healthy Discipleship movement.

One word about Emotionally Healthy Discipleship generally and Emotionally Healthy Success in particular: These are not books to be read quickly or summarized in an essay like this. You have to read the books, do the exercises they recommend, and make the changes required to achieve emotionally healthy spirituality, relationships, and leadership. This is why pastors and church leaders need to do the work personally before leading a group of people through the materials. In a reversal of the phrase, “It is not about you,” it is about you (and me). It is about being the person and disciple God calls you (and me) be before anything else.

Perhaps just as importantly, it is important to do the work with your spouse and other colleagues. Fortunately, Emotionally Healthy Discipleship offers online leadership training for church leaders, preparing them to bring this ministry to their local church. Kathy and I have done the training, and it was wonderful. We are still in contact with some of the people we met during the training. Next week, we are beginning a new couples course with folks from around the country. It has been a wonderful experience.

Next week, I am going to return to how false metrics lead us to false ways of thinking about ourselves and what leadership requires of us, causing failure and misery to ourselves, others, and the cause of Christ.

Blessings to all.

^[1] Pete Scazzero, Emotionally Healthy Success: Measuring What Matters Most to Jesus  (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2026. See also, Peter Scazzero, Emotionally Healthy Discipleship: Moving from Shallow Christianity to Deep Transformation (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2021). For those who wish to read all of his books, see, Peter Scazzero, The Emotionally Healthy Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2003, 2010), Emotionally Healthy Spirituality updated ed (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2017), The Emotionally Healthy Leader: How Transforming your Inner Life will Deeply Transform your Church, Team, and World (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2017)

[2] Although Emotionally Healthy Success is primarily written for religious leaders, its principles are equally valid for those of us in secular occupations. They are also valid for non-Christians, though people from other faith traditions or no faith tradition will have to adapt certain principles for their own tradition.

^[3] Id, 24.