excellence....

Excellence has been a buzz word in the church since I remember first hearing about Willow Creek in the late 80’s. Ever since, and especially as I have been in leadership of technical ministries, the word excellence has been thrown around in many ways and misused. I wrote my own definition of excellence to help my teams understand what we were striving for….

Excellence is fully using your God given talents, abilities and resources to glorify Him.

I think Shane Duffey, Creative Arts Pastor down at NewSpring Church hit the nail on the head with this post on excellence….

If you look up the term excellence in a dictionary you’ll find the following words used to define it: excelling, eminence, high quality, unusual goodness or worth… just to name a few.

As we strive for excellence as a church and I strive for excellence in my life and work, I’m starting to see that true excellence is all of those things, but one more qualifier must exist.

Excellence = removing everything (from a worship service, discipleship process, volunteer experience, my life, etc…) that distracts someone from seeing Jesus. We can offer great quality and effort in all we do, but if we’re not careful we can be so good that we make an idol out of whatever it is we’re doing so well and allow Jesus to be overlooked. That, by any definition, would not equal excellence.