When do people change?

My goal in ministry is to see people change. It is incredibly easy to get sidetracked from this goal and to begin to over-value numerical growth, more publicity, bigger budgets for their own sake. Those things are immediate, tangible, public, exciting. But the kind of church growth Paul longs for is the growth of people ‘in every way into him who is the head, into Christ’ (Ephesians 4.15).

So, how does that happen? How do people change? How do they grow into Christ? Here are two thoughts.

When Tim Chester spoke to us recently he said that we shouldn’t so much tell people that they should not do something as that they need not do it. In other words, we hold out a better way of finding joy, meaning, and purpose in life. People need not sin because there is a better option: trusting the promises of God. Tim Chester makes this point in his book You Can Change. It is also the fundamental point of John Piper’s classic Future Grace.

This question of how to help people (including myself) change is very important to me. So I thought about it recently as I read an opinion column by Thomas Friedman in the New York Times. Friedman is talking about countries, not individuals, changing. But it seems to me there is wisdom here for us in ministry. Here are a few selected paragraphs from Thomas Friedman’s column ‘Don’t Build Up,’ October 27, 2009 in the New York Times:

“…when I think back on all the moments of progress in that part of the world — all the times when a key player in the Middle East actually did something that put a smile on my face — all of them have one thing in common: America had nothing to do with it.

America helped build out what they started, but the breakthrough didn’t start with us. We can fan the flames, but the parties themselves have to light the fires of moderation. And whenever we try to do it for them, whenever we want it more than they do, we fail and they languish.

The message: “People do not change when we tell them they should,” said the Johns Hopkins University foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum. “They change when they tell themselves they must.”

And when the moderate silent majorities take ownership of their own futures, we win. When they won’t, when we want them to compromise more than they do, we lose. The locals sense they have us over a barrel, so they exploit our naïve goodwill and presence to loot their countries and to defeat their internal foes.”

I’m not yet totally sure how to apply this to Christian ministry. We should surely go after straying sheep. We surely should not ignore people who don’t yet see the need to change. But it seems to me there is an important point in Friedman’s essay. True change does not come from the pastor or the ministry leader telling someone they need to change. It comes when that person sees the need to change and is awakened to the promise that God’s way of living is a better, more desirable way. We need to pray more for this internal heart work. We need to have open eyes to see where God is already doing a work that we can then ‘build out’ in ministry. We need to hold out God’s promises as motivation for those who are struggling to change.

Posted by Stephen Witmer on Nov 2, 11:16 AM