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As I write this article I have just finished a two day pastors training and retreat for the Montana SBC. On the first day I was struck by the statement, “Christian/church strive for perfection, settle for excellence.” I want to take some time and unpack why this statement is important for both believers and churches.
What is Perfection and Excellence
Before we dive into what this statement means for believers and churches we need to understand what Biblical perfection and excellence are. And how they're different.
Biblical Perfection
In order to understand why we should strive for perfection we must first understand what Biblical perfection is, so that when we don't meet it we'll know why. The Bible is clear there is only one who is perfect: God. Jesus as God incarnate and a member of the Trinity is Perfect. God the Father is Perfect. God the Holy Spirit is Perfect. Humanity in it's fallen, sinful nature is imperfect and cannot attain perfection, in this earthly life. It is only through God's grace that we can do any good.
Biblical Excellence
Though, we cannot attain perfection we can meet excellence. Excellence is living life for Christ to the highest degree of potential we can. It means following Christ our perfect Redeemer in the face of the difficulties that we face. This looks like taking Peter's example and accepting the forgiveness Christ offers when we fall short. It looks like striving to imitate Christ's earthly life-with the knowledge and acceptance that we will never succeed but knowing that the attempt will lead us closer to God as we run from our sin nature.
What does this look like for believers and churches
This idea of, striving for perfection and settling for excellence looks different for churches and individual believers.
Believers
In our day-to-day lives as believers we should be striving to imitate Christ in every part of our lives. This is what striving for perfection means. This comes with the foreknowledge that we will not, and cannot, imitate Him exactly- if we could then there would be no reason for His entering into humanity to provide Salvation.
For us as believers, Paul tells us to become imitator of God and walk in love as Christ first loved us all the way to the point of sacrifice. (Ephesians 5:1) This is a thought reiterated from Galatians 5:13 where He describes that though we have been called to freedom through Christ, we should not use this freedom to benefit our own impulses, we should use it serve and love one another.
We should strive in our lives to follow the example set by Christ, and settle for living lives similar to the Apostles- lives that show a clear faith and understanding of who Christ is and what He has done and which is reflected in the actions, words, thoughts, and motivations of the believer. We do this through how we act and speak as well as how we steward what God has made us stewards over, including how we serve our church family and use the gifting God has provided us.
Churches
For churches, to strive for perfection and settle for excellence, this shows up differently than it does in the lives of believers. We as churches should strive to always put our best foot forward, no matter what that looks like.
An example could be worship music. If you are using a high-quality pre-recorded music/lyric video and someone, who is not musically gifted, wants to serve the church through music. We should be able to, and should graciously but firmly, redirect their desire to serve to an area that better suits that individuals gifting rather than going from high-quality pre-recorded music to low-quality live music.
Why would/should we do this? Because if we don't redirect that person's desire to serve, but instead allow them to lead worship, poorly, our worship music would become a distraction from what we are trying to do: worship God through singing. The same is true of all areas of our worship and gathering time (service time). If we allow people that don't have the ability to do a task, or who perform the task poorly, to attempt the task, our time of worship will become a hinderance to us worshiping God. This doesn't mean, however, that those that have budding gifting in areas are not given opportunities to develop, rather we allow them to develop their gifting in ways that won't disrupt our services.
So, in the case of new guitarist with a passion and desire to play in the worship band, but who doesn't yet have the skills necessary to play during service. If we allow them the opportunity to practice with the worship band during rehearsals as they develop the skills to play the guitar. We can provide them the opportunity to become equipped to perform the task while not letting them become a distraction in our service.
As churches, we should do whatever we can to "pull off" the perfect service, knowing that at sometime something will go askew. We should do so, so that we don't create any unnecessary distractions from the Gospel message being demonstrated and presented during our services and activities. We should strive for perfection, but settle for being only excellent.
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