Why I Wrote Emotionally Healthy Success

So let me ask you, what if you succeed brilliantly at something in your life, at something God perhaps never asked you to do? Is it possible to succeed at the wrong thing? What if others are applauding you for things that God has not even asked you to do? We live in a culture with powerful scorecards about what success looks like, growth, bigger, better, influence, more visibility and power, money, achievement, you name it, productivity.

And it's just easy for us, so easy, it's so common for us as Christians and ministries to just take those scorecards of what success is, and we just bring it into the church.

We just bring it into our work for Jesus.

And this is a question that's taken me almost 40 years to answer.

What does success actually look like to God? So a bit of a story that exposed my own wrong definition of success.

And I'll just begin with the planting of the church that I founded called New Life Fellowship Church in Queens, New York.

For the first six, seven years, I thought I knew what success was.

I was quite sure of it, actually.

growing the ministry numerically, greater power, fulfilling the Great Commission, going to make disciples of all nations, maximizing my gifts and talents, as well as maximizing the talents and gifts of everybody around us as we built this community.

But the result was we were very active.

We were busy.

We were stressed.

We were growing.

But our joy was diminishing.

I was tired, so was a lot of other people.

There was drivenness, for sure, in the culture.

And I saw clearly, at least in other people initially, that a person can be doing a lot and apparently growing a ministry, and yet... internally becoming less and less like Jesus.

I just didn't see it in me.

And then we had a church split, a crisis.

And in one of the congregations we planted, we were one church in two languages and our Spanish congregation in the afternoon split.

And I invested so much of my life, five years, to build it.

And I ended up on a descent for a couple of years that I would never have chosen.

And I had to face questions that I was previously avoiding.

Questions like, what happens when what I'm building, what I'm investing my life in, is not producing the kind of results I had hoped? how much of this actually is about me not being a loser, and who am I when I don't appear successful, at least by the standards everyone's put around me, and the world's standards, the church's standards.

And I realized that I had spent a good part of my leadership life, my ministry, succeeding at things for God that he never asked me to do.