Resurrecting Excellence: Shaping Faithful Christian Ministry
By Gregory Jones and Kevin Armstrong
© 2006, Grand Rapids, MI, Wm. B Eerdmans Publishing Company. ISBN 0-8028-3234-2

Chapter Titles & Mini-Summaries
1. Ambition for the Gospel: A Call to Resurrecting Excellence

God is the benchmark of excellence. His clearest demonstration of excellence is in the life, death, and resurrection of his Son, Jesus Christ. This excellence calls forth and demands our best, and as we offer that faithfully to God, our ministry becomes beautiful and charged with “resurrecting excellence.”

2. Inhabiting the Intersections: A Still More Excellent Way

Excellence in ministry is reflected in the ability of the church to bring together opposite and different perspectives to “intersect” with each other: “youth and age, strength and weakness, joy and suffering, abundance and sacrifice, tragedy and hope, community and solitude, church and world. Churches that live in these intersections are likely to manifest a commitment to resurrecting excellence precisely by being shaped by the gospel of Jesus Christ.”

3. Resurrecting Excellence in the Christian Vocation

The first calling of a minister is the same calling as every other Christian – to pursue with excellence the life of discipleship. This pursuit is shaped by the practices of the Christian faith, which when given priority in our lives allow us to recognize and pursue resurrecting excellence in all of life.

4. Resurrecting Excellence in the Pastoral Vocation

Ministry is a calling, profession, and an office. Excellence ministry balances these three, while guarding against the distortions that often arise from these three aspects of ministry: Therapy, Careerism, Hierarchy and Bureaucracy. This balance can be maintained as the minister pursues the gifts of attentiveness, wisdom, and administration.

5. Learning and Leading: The Cultivation of Excellence Ministry

Excellent ministry is led and cultivated by a “learning clergy.” Learning is a lifelong pursuit that begins in the basic discipleship of Christians, the preparation to become a pastor, and the continual and ongoing learning of the pastor as he or she practices ministry.

6. The Treasures of Excellent Ministry

We must identify and engage the treasures of excellent ministry if such ministry is to be sustained and advanced. These treasures include, but are not limited to, formative and imaginative treasures (Scripture, theology, prayers, hymns, poetry, literature, and a variety of arts), institutional treasures, and economical treasures (pastoral compensation, funding for theological education, and financial resources among churches and the larger culture).

Summary

In Resurrecting Excellence: Shaping Faithful Christian Ministry, Jones and Armstrong issues a clarion call for the church to look to God as “the referent, standard and source” of excellent ministry. The excellence of God is most clearly demonstrated in the life, death and resurrection of Christ. It is to this reality that they invite the reader to look at and pattern their lives after. This is the call to resurrecting excellence.

Resurrecting excellence happens as the church inhabits the disparities and perplexities of our world, what Jones and Armstrong call “the intersections.” In these intersections they bring together seemingly incongruent things like hope and tragedy, rich and poor, young and old. By doing so, the church is testifying to the “new life of Easter.” This is where resurrecting excellence shines.

In order for the church to pursue resurrecting excellence, it must be led by competent leaders. They propose a move away from “learned leaders” to “learning leaders.” The development of these “learning leaders” begins in their local church through basic discipleship, is advanced by ministerial education that forms the spirit and the mind, and continues through the practice of ministry itself. If the church is to faithfully answer the call to resurrecting excellence, it must engage the resources available and use them to cultivate excellence at each stage of developing learning leaders. These learning leaders will be able to live and lead well, which leads to a beautiful ministry of resurrecting excellence.

Key Ideas

Thesis: “We believe that the resurrection rightly focuses our attention on the hope to which we have been called and shapes our sense of excellence in the light of God’s glory as revealed in the crucified and risen Christ. The worthiness – the excellence – of our lives is to be patterned in Christ, and specifically the hope and new life we discover in the power of the resurrection. Our ambition for the gospel is a call to the resurrecting excellence of the Triune God.”

1. What if excellence were articulated as a response to the question, “Where is the presence and power of God being manifested in this congregation’s life, in this person’s life, in this person’s pastoral leadership?” This question moves the discussion away from the issues of technical skill, perfection, and performance toward issues of connecting with God, yielding to him, giving him your best, and allowing him to work through you to share the “new life of Easter.” (Kindle Edition, Loc. 144-45)

2. Here is a fresh perspective for the pastor’s job description: “WANTED: Persons for a vocation that leads God’s people in bearing witness to God’s new creation revealed in Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. Work schedule is shaped by relationships, focusing on what is important in people’s lives, and depends on regular rhythms of work, rest, and play. Compensation is shaped by a mutual discernment of what is necessary in order for the persons (and, where appropriate, their families) to have an appropriately well-lived life. The vocation involves cultivating holy dispositions, preaching and teaching, nurturing rigorous study, and shaping practices of faithful living in church and world. Lifelong education and formation is expected in order to enable others also to grow throughout their lives. The successful candidate will collaborate with others toward the same ends. The vocation reports to God.” (Kindle Edition, Loc. 386-91)

3. One of the keys to effective, excellent ministry is “caring about the particulars of ministry and people without being overwhelmed by them.” In order to accomplish that tight-rope balancing act one must withdraw from the people ministry is directed to, so that the minister can be alone with the one he is doing ministry for/with. Jesus himself modeled this in finding time in the midst of the demands of ministry to get away and be alone for worship, prayer and connection with his father. If Jesus needed this, who are we to think we can get by without it?

4. Developing eyes to see and ears to hear the beauty and excellence of God’s work in this world is a necessary commitment if we are to recognize and participate in excellent ministry. These eyes and ears are cultivated through the practices or disciplines of the faith. “Careful attention to these practices is indispensable in cultivating genuine excellence.” Daniel Chambliss points out the difference between those who rise to the Olympic level and those who only come close is this: “Of course there is no secret; there is only the doing of all those little things, each one done correctly, time and again, until excellence in every detail becomes a firmly ingrained habit, an ordinary part of one’s everyday life.”

5. The three aspects of ministry offer a helpful framework for the function of ministry. The discussion of calling, profession, and office along with their distortions therapy, careerism, hierarchy and bureaucracy is a good warning of the dangers associated with ministry. It was also insightful to connect each of these areas with their respective gifts which should be cultivated: attentiveness (listening), wisdom, and administration. I would like to do some more reflecting on these ideas and their implications.

6. An important part of increasing the competency and excellence of the pastoral ministry is the training of laity in our churches. People who come to faith in Christ in our churches and are trained effectively in the basics of discipleship will have a stronger foundation upon which to build in preparation for pastoral ministry if God should so call them to that vocation.

7. Three phases/aspects necessary in the cultivation of excellent ministry: Discipleship, education, and practice.

Great Quotes

1. “Christian ministry, lived faithfully and well, is beautiful.” (Kindle Edition, Loc. 155)

2. “When people discover and experience the beauty of an excellent Christian congregation, they are drawn to reorder their lives to become part of it. By participating in such a congregation, people begin to learn to cast off sinful habits that have wreaked havoc in their lives and in the world, they cultivate practices and friendships that bear witness to the light of Christ by the power of the Spirit, and they shift their priorities so that this congregation becomes the primary marker by which they order their days.” (Kindle Edition, Loc. 321-24)

3. “Patterning our lives in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ invites us to discover intersections that we often otherwise turn into false alternatives – youth and age, strength and weakness, joy and suffering, abundance and sacrifice, tragedy and hope, community and solitude, church and world. Churches that live in these intersections are likely to manifest a commitment to resurrecting excellence precisely by being shaped by the gospel of Jesus Christ.” (Kindle Edition, Loc. 408-10)

4. “We cannot see the whole scope of Christian life – the breadth and length and height and depth of it. We cannot assess fully its outcomes. The standard of excellence against which we measure our lives, the glory of God revealed in Jesus Christ, stretches out to infinity in every direction. We will never comprehend it entirely. It is the work of a lifetime even to try to bear a faithful witness.” (Kindle Edition, Loc. 413-16)

5. “Resurrecting excellence in ministry happens in intersections, and the pastoral leader is not simply a crossing guard. The pastor is an artist of the intersection, seeking connections among the often paradoxical dimensions of life – ancient texts and current dilemmas, inner experience and public responsibility, what has been and what yet might be.” (Kindle Edition, Loc. 425-426)

6. “Resurrecting excellence does not depend on moral perfection, workaholic behavior, or individual effectiveness. It depends on the intersection of human creativity with divine creativity and on communities of people who join together in a journey of faithfulness to God’s inbreaking kingdom.” (Kindle Edition, Loc. 567-69)

7. “Resurrection excellence in Christian life and ministry referent, standard, and source in the excellence of the Triune God.” (Kindle Edition, Loc. 667-682)

8. “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.” – Keats (Kindle Edition, Loc. 1860-61)

Suggested Reading

Heidi Neumark, Breathing Space: A Spiritual Journey in the South Bronx (Boston: Beacon, 2003).

Jim Collins, Good to Great (New York: HarperCollins, 2001).

Ephraim Radner, The End of the Church: A Pneumatology of Christian Division in the West (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998).

Gregory the Great, Pastoral Care, trans. Henry Davis, S. J. (New York: Newman, 1950).

H. Richard Niebuhr, The Purpose of the Church and Its Ministry (New York: Harper & Row, 1956).