Sermons

Goodness Over Greatness

In 2001, business and leadership writer Jim Collins wrote the bestselling book Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t. Collins conducted research on 11 companies that had “made the leap” and chronicled why “good is the enemy of great.” Collins defined “greatness” as “distinctive impact” and “superior performance” shepherded by a “level five leader.”

It’s no wonder the book was so popular. Americans love greatness. It’s no coincidence that one of the major slogans of the recent presidential campaign was “Make America Great Again.” We tend to adopt that language in the church as well. We often think that the measure of a church’s greatness is its “superior performance” in all the metrics that business organizations measure: bigger, faster, stronger, richer and more famous.

The idea, then, is that if you’re not yet great, you have work to do.

The problem, however, is that greatness isn’t easy to sustain. Of the 11 “great” companies that Collins profiled in his wildly popular book, most are not so great a decade and a half later:

  • Circuit City, one of the most successful companies profiled in the book, went out of
    business in 2009, buried by competition from Best Buy and online retailers.
  • Fannie Mae (the Federal National Mortgage Association) had to be bailed out by the
    government during the mortgage crisis, and is seen by many as contributing to the cause of the
    crisis in the first place.
  • Five of the companies (Abbott Labs, Kimberly-Clark, Kroger, Walgreens and Wells
    Fargo) have done okay but with only modest market gains.
  • Only Nucor (a steel producer) and Philip Morris (the tobacco producer) have remained
    “great” according to Collins’ criteria.

It would be easy to scoff in hindsight at Collins’ research, but most books like this illustrate the principle that past results do not always predict future performance.

But it does raise a question. Is greatness really the best goal for an organization, a nation, a business or a church? The prophet Micah didn’t seem to think so. When we turn to the Scriptures, one of the things we realize is that greatness is vastly overrated.

In fact, rather than the good being the enemy of the great, biblically speaking, greatness
is actually the enemy of goodness.

Micah wrote to Judah during a time when the nation was under the thumb of the Assyrian Empire. The northern kingdom of Israel had already been swallowed up by the Assyrians in 722 B.C., and Jerusalem itself was saved only because its king, Hezekiah, paid off the invaders. The people would have remembered when they were once a great nation, and may have wondered how to get that back again.

Indeed, that’s one of the overarching themes of Micah. It recalls Genesis 12, where God promised Abraham that his offspring would become a “great” nation through whom all the nations of the world would be blessed.

But greatness is contingent upon consistency over time, and Israel demonstrated that it could not sustain that greatness. The kingdom that had reached its height of greatness during the days of David and Solomon was now a shadow of its former self, divided and conquered. Micah chronicles how the country had gone off the rails with oppression of the poor, corruption in its courts, dishonest economic practices, false prophets, greedy priests, loss of order and, most tellingly, a rejection of God’s justice and God’s commandments.

Through the prophet, God delivers judgment on the nation, but that judgment is also tempered with hope. God tells the people that they will be restored. But how will it happen?

Well, we learn first that it won’t be because they achieve greatness in their religious practices. “With what shall I come before the Lord and bow myself before God on high?” asks the prophet (v. 6). “Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousand rivers of oil? Should I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?” (v. 7).

These are all ridiculously expensive sacrifices – about as good a religious performance metric as an Israelite could imagine. This was sacrifice for the forgiveness of sins on a grand scale. But was that superior religious performance the thing that God really desired of them then? Is it what God wants from us now?

Take this forward to the church and we might ask, “With what shall we come before the Lord? With our great buildings, our filled seats, our million-dollar budgets? Will God be pleased if we show him that we’re successful? Is bigger, better, faster and stronger the sign of the kind of church God blesses? The kind of nation God blesses? Is greatness what God is after?”

Micah says no. Instead he says (v. 8): “He has told you, O mortal, what is good.” What does the Lord desire? Goodness, not greatness. It’s been God’s desire all along, from the very first moments of creation, when God saw everything and called it good.

What does such goodness look like? How do we measure it?

Well, first the prophet says that goodness begins with doing justice (v. 8). The Hebrew word mispat refers to God’s order for all of life. To “do justice,” in other words, means that we order all of our lives, including our interactions with others, in accordance with God’s will.

God is the one who sets the standard of goodness, and nothing we say or do can be good if it is not said or done according to his will. In fact, according to Pastor Kurt Tomlinson, “Goodness is something that is all of God, whereas ‘greatness’ is what we humans attempt.”

When we “do justice” it’s a recognition that goodness is defined by what God wills and empowers, and not by what we want or desire.

Micah builds on “justice” then by saying that true goodness is also the result of loving “kindness” (v. 8). The Hebrew word hesed is sometimes translated as “kindness” or “mercy,” but it is primarily a word connected to covenant faithfulness to God and to others. Being good means that we maintain faithfulness to God in all things and demonstrate that faithfulness by our steadfast love for God and for all God’s people.

Here’s how that works. Sin is primarily about breaking covenant with God. Israel had broken her covenant with God in favor of seeking greatness on her own. But great is often the enemy of good and God requires faithfulness, not just intellectual expressions of faith.

Faithfulness looks more like following than thinking. We remember the covenant God makes with us in our baptism and we live it out day to day in all that we say and do. We are called to love such faithfulness and carry it out in community with God and each other.

And lastly, Micah says, being good means walking humbly with our God (v. 8). The Hebrew word hasenea means more than simple modesty and humility, however. It implies attentiveness, or paying attention to God. The people are to watch God for what is good and not do their own thing and call it good.

In our desire to be great, we often miss what is good. We fail to pay attention to what God would have us do. We fail to pray, to seek God’s face, to discern together what the will of God might be. In church meetings, this looks like lobbying. At home, it looks more like neglecting daily prayer and reading the Scriptures and failing to gather with the people of God. We tend only to pay attention to God when we need something from God; otherwise, we are pursuing greatness on our own.

But that is a formula for failure. When we pay attention to God, humbling ourselves, it’s then that we can begin to stay faithful to the covenant and do justice as servants of God.

Granted, it’s tempting to go after greatness. Greatness gets your name on the cover of the magazine. It gets you the award, the gold watch, the recognition we believe we so richly deserve. But God doesn’t require greatness – only goodness. Goodness is much more sustainable, but it takes a long view to see that. When we focus on doing God’s will, being faithful to God’s covenant and being attentive to God’s leading, we have done all that we were meant to do – regardless of whether the results impress anyone else.

The early Christian church seemed to have embraced a goodness-over-greatness strategy for its own growth. In his book, The Patient Ferment of the Early Church, historian Alan Kreider looked at the rapid growth of the early church and wanted to see what exactly caused the church to grow during a time when it was underground and persecuted. We would expect him to find that it was about measures of greatness – grand evangelism strategies, great preaching, attractive worship, superior leadership, better methods – all things that we measure and value in a good-to-great culture.

But the truth is that, in every case, Kreider discovered that the real virtue that caused the early church to grow was patient faithfulness. They spent up to three years examining people before admitting them to membership, during which they trained them in faithfulness and to represent the character of Christ. Interestingly, their documents reveal that they didn’t have much of a focus on evangelism or on preaching. Instead, it was about cultivating faithfulness and building up people who looked like Jesus.

They attracted others not because of their success but because of their character.

They measured success by growing good people rather than by growing a great church.

That’s our measurement as well. Are we doing justice, seeking the will of God? Do we love faithfulness, living out the covenant with God we made in our baptism? And are we walking humbly, paying attention to what God is doing in our lives and in the world around us?

That’s what the Lord requires of us.