Moving Toward Being Professional

The goal we aspire to at the end of these weeks - as I wrote on Monday - is to become fairly professional.

To be perfectly clear - we are not grasping to become excellent. 

To quote the mohawk wearing prophet of the 80s, Mr. T - “I pity the fool who is reaching for excellence.”

Some may naively think God is into excellence.  You couldn’t be further from the truth.  “I’ll do my best for God” is not what excellence is about in the least. 

The “I’ll do my best…” line is another topic to open up (which could be great / could be something else - we’ll save that for another time). 

Excellence was a short-lived trend Tom Peters started with his mega-selling book of the mid-80s In Search of Excellence.  In church world years, that means the most advanced echo-ish thinkers and writers picked up on Peters about 7.5 years later… with the rest of the church getting it 15 years later.

Jesus has never been about the message of excellence.

Quite the contrary in fact.  Jesus had a ministry to those who were wrecked by those who in God’s name forced excellence upon all around. 
The gospels do have a repeating story of people being called to matters of excellence.

It is the "You’re not quite good enough" message that is often repeated by Temple leaders on page after page of the gospel accounts.  Their line to those who came to make a sacrifice was “Your dove is not quite good enough sacrifice material.  However today we happen to have a special on sacrifice doves.  Tell you what we can do for you - I don’t know what I’m saying - I must be out of my mind to talk this way - if my boss heard this crazy talk I’d be canned in a second… Yes this dove is somewhat more expensive than what you can afford (ten times more), but hey, it is expensive in order to please God… You need to have a perfect sacrifice.  That’s what sacrifice is all about… We are building our empire here… someone has to foot the bills… Doves don’t grow on trees you know” (Yes they do sit on branches in trees but that’s not the same).