Habits of Highly Effective Christians

Last Sunday, we began a three-week sermon series called "Three Habits of Highly Effective Christians." The first sermon, "Investing Our Talents," focused on a couple of things, namely identifying what we have to offer (What are our talents?) and then identifying our mission (What do we want to do?).

This week, we'll continue along the same line of thinking and look at "Committing to the Mission." In particular, we'll consider how we focus on achievable things and how we maintain our dedication to those goals over time.

Before moving ahead, though, I think it's important to consider a couple of things from last week. First, I began the sermon with some questions that are pretty difficult to answer. What does a highly effective Christian look like? How does someone measure the effectiveness of a Christian? These are hard questions, and I wanted them to sound a little hard in the sermon, hoping that you would see a challenge and think about them this week.

Some might think that these questions are unfair, but I think we measure the effectiveness of most of the things in our life. Some of it is explicit -- many of us face job performance reports/assessments on a regular basis. Those of us in school get periodic report cards. Some is internalized -- we measure all sorts of things: our cooking, our driving, our parenting, our humor, our organizational skills, and on and on.

I think we measure the effectiveness of our faith too, but we almost never realize we're doing it. Even those who come to find God or their faith as unhelpful or irrelevant and who walk away from it rarely realize that they've measured faith and judged it ineffective. And for regular church-going folk, the same problem exists in a different way -- most believe that their faith is important and helpful, but few can explain this with any details.

And the details are important. Imagine that I was a baseball coach, offering to teach the sport. 'We're going to work on the things that are important,' I say. What are those?, you ask. If I squirm and say, 'you know, all of the important things,' you probably will worry a bit. On the other hand, if I talk about throwing accuracy, fielding practice, and learning to hit a curve ball, you probably feel like there's a reason to practice -- and a reason to hope that you'll get better at certain things.

The same is true in faith. Very few people think they are perfect Christians. Most of us strive to be "okay Christians" or "good Christians," but those are difficult things to define too. Jesus affirmed this definition (given by a lawyer): "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself" (Luke 10:27). The way to measure such faith is by understanding how God has changed our lives and how we have reached out to others, in faith, to help change their lives.

The great possibility of our faith is that there is almost an infinite number of ways to live out our faith in these terms. Unfortunately, the great obstacle is that there are few well-defined paths for us to follow, which threatens our effectiveness as Christians.

The most direct threat is cultural. The shift to a faster-paced, 24/7 society has put enormous strains on most people's time, particularly those from ages 6-65. We are expected to be more available and more devoted to our education and our jobs (owing to the amount of money we need to earn to support our expected lifestyle). We are expected to raise our children in a certain way and fulfill a certain number of civic obligations. We are expected to obtain and maintain a home. (And, having been heavily influenced by these expectations, we expect them of ourselves too.)

The challenge is that the expectations of faith have pretty much slipped through the cracks for many people. For a long time, society has supported churches and people of faith in ways that have made these questions less important. In particular, weekly schedules used to preserve Sunday mornings and Wednesday evenings for church activities -- even in the busy American culture. But these things are fading into the distance.

This means that if faith is going to be a priority for us -- both as individuals and as a church -- we need to make it a priority in the face of opposing expectations. No longer do we have the luxury of a culture which encourages us to make time for God -- instead, we need to proactively take time to be with God.

Given our habits and the other expectations of our lives, we must believe that our faith is effective. Otherwise we will have little incentive to pursue it; instead we will have overwhelming incentive to abandon our faith and do other things that we find effective. Unfortunately, this is a challenge for churches too. It is no longer enough to be a nice place to worship -- a church's effectiveness is measured. And if people find a church to be ineffective, they take their money and their time and go elsewhere -- maybe to another church or maybe to something almost entirely unrelated to faith.

This Sunday, we'll continue exploring ways of thinking about the effectiveness of our faith to counteract some of these negative cultural influences, both for our individual faith and for our shared faith as church.