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From Robin Lovin, in this week’s Christian Century:
Perhaps it is time for Christians to remind the world and ourselves that results are not the only things that matter. The obsession with results is the soil in which fraud and exploitation grow… Every human success has its limits, and we are finally dependent on one another and on God. Faith provides some resistance to our common human temptation to forget that. Faith demands an initial honesty before God that gets in the way of the deceit and self-deception from which scandals grow. As Stanley Hauerwas puts it, we are called to be faithful, not effective.
That does not mean that we are called to be ineffective, or that failure is itself a measure of faith. The point is rather that effectiveness is never entirely the result of our own efforts. Success is not something we can deliver on our own. Alongside a doctrine of original sin, we need a working doctrine of grace to guide our risking, winning, and losing…
Being faithful means that instead of asking for more, we begin by asking what faithful people would do. Chances are the answer will put us where the needs are greater and the risks of failure are higher than we would choose if more were all that mattered. Being faithful involves a certain prayerful expectation of results, but — here’s where the working doctrine of grace comes in — our commitment is not to produce results. Our commitment is to discern what faithful people would do, and then do it.
–Robin Lovin, “Faithful and Effective”, Christian Century, June 13, 2006
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