I am trying to picture Shawn Lovejoy sitting in my office
with me as I write this review. I felt as if his book, The Measure of Our
Success, was doing the very thing it was arguing against. And the more I read,
the more frustrated I got. So, if I picture that brother sitting here, it makes
me less inclined to vent.
The premise of Lovejoy’s argument is that we pastors tend to
measure success by all the wrong criteria – number of bodies in the pew, budget
size, growth rates, etc., and with this I can heartily agree. But, it seemed to
me that the book spent just as much time defending those criteria in the end.
What was even more difficult was the fact that every chapter was completed with
another pastor’s interaction to what Lovejoy had just written. Tellingly, all
of these pastors were of the celebrity type. I longed for some unknown, country
church bloke to write one of these responses! If we are not supposed to try and
be like the mega-church dudes, why are they the only ones whose opinions seemed
to matter?
Admittedly, I gave up on the book about halfway through, so
my review cannot be considered as thorough as I would like. But as I sped
through the second half I didn’t see anything to change me evaluation.
This book would have been greatly helped by a robust and
convincing “tearing down the idols in our hearts and lives” (27) that so
plagues ministers of the Gospel. From what I could see, that never happened.
A far better read in this vein is R. Kent Hughes, LiberatingMinistry From the Success Syndrome.
(This book was provided courtesy of Graf-Martin
Communications and BakerBooks in exchange for an honest review.)
