Excerpt from Authentic Pursuit (Preface)
Are you trying to get people to look at you or to look at God?
“The truth is, Jesus never called us to build fan bases for ourselves. Jesus never commanded any of the 12 apostles to pursue church planting for the sake of fame, power, influence, or reputation. In fact, Jesus actually said something quite the opposite. He said, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and those in high positions act as tyrants over them. It must not be like that among you.” (Matthew 20:25–26, emphasis added).
Jesus is telling His apostles to get rid of the worldly paradigm of success altogether. Success in the world’s eyes equals your face on the cover of Fortune 500, a high-rise office with a subservient staff and an assistant that gets you anything you want, a Learjet, a couple of extravagant vacations each year, and all the power and influence you could possibly want. As painful as it is to admit, success in the eyes of the church world far too often looks more like the world’s view of success than Jesus’s view of success. But Jesus continues, “On the contrary, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first among you must be your slave; just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Matthew 20:26–28).
“Jesus never called us to build a fan base, but He did call us to build disciples of Him.”
Jesus never called us to build a fan base, but He did call us to build disciples of Him by being servants and laying down our lives, and we can only do that when we get out of the way and let His name be the name that’s glorified in all of our endeavors. If we take all the credit for any of the victories and successes God gives us in the process of church planting, we’ll start blaming ourselves during times of difficulty and seasons of refinement. We have to get it in our thick skulls that it’s not about us at all—it’s all about Christ.“
—Excerpt from preface of Authentic Pursuit by Corey Trimble with Josh Brooker