We love scoreboards.

Maybe that's one reason sports ministry feels so natural to me. At the end of the game, there is a number that tells you who won and who lost. There isn't much ambiguity about it.

The problem is that we often bring that same mentality into places where God never gave us a scoreboard.

In ministry, we count attendance. We count salvations. We count baptisms. We count giving. We count followers, views, engagement, volunteers, small groups, campuses, and whatever else we can put into a spreadsheet.

And to be clear: numbers matter because people matter. I believe in setting goals, measuring effectiveness, evaluating what is working, and being a good steward of what God has entrusted to us. Jesus Himself spoke about fruitfulness (John 15:1–8).

But numbers make terrible gods.

Because if we're not careful, we'll start using visible results to determine whether we have been successful in something God only asked us to be obedient in.

After fifteen years in vocational ministry, this is something I hold true:

Your success is measured by your obedience to God.

So I stepped out.

I trained. I planned. I learned. I dreamed about the church we could build and the people we could reach. I believed in the vision enough to leave what was familiar and pursue it.

And then...

The church never launched.

I wasn't able to raise enough money.

I wasn't able to build the launch team we needed.

There was no grand opening.

No packed auditorium.

No launch Sunday testimony.

No story that ended with, "And then two thousand of people came."

By the metrics we often use to define success in ministry, I failed.

For a long time, that was difficult to reconcile.

Because what do you do when you believe you heard God, you obey what you believed He told you to do, and the outcome looks nothing like what you imagined?

Eventually, I had to learn something that has shaped the way I understand calling ever since:

The outcome of my obedience belongs to God. The responsibility to obey belongs to me.

Jeremiah faithfully proclaimed God's message while experiencing rejection, persecution, and imprisonment (Jeremiah 20:1–2; Jeremiah 37:11–16).

Paul followed the call of God and encountered beatings, imprisonment, shipwrecks, rejection, and suffering (2 Corinthians 11:23–28).

And Jesus Himself was perfectly obedient to the Father, yet His obedience led Him to a cross.

Philippians 2:8 says that Jesus:

“...humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.”

If visible comfort, popularity, and immediate results are our definition of success, we would have to look at Good Friday and call Jesus unsuccessful.

But heaven's scoreboard is different from ours.

I didn't know that years later I would be walking through athletic facilities, discipling college athletes, building ministry systems, developing leaders, raising financial support, creating small-group environments, communicating vision, and building ministry on a college campus.

But God did.

The assignment I thought was about launching a church was also developing the leader God would use in assignments I hadn't encountered yet.

And Journey Church wasn't the end of the story.

Through that season, God led me into my next assignment at South Coast Church in Mobile, Alabama.

South Coast was a life-giving, thriving church where I found tremendous alignment with the ministry model—particularly its approach to Small Groups.

Suddenly, so much of what I had been learning had somewhere to go.

I was able to bring value to an existing ministry, put training into practice, sharpen my skills, contribute vision, serve people, and experience what it looked like to operate within a ministry culture I deeply believed in.

And the relationships built during that season are relationships I still hold dearly today.

Looking backward, I can see connections that were impossible for me to see while I was standing in the disappointment.

God was doing something even when it looked like nothing was working.

God may simply be asking:

Did you do what I told you to do?

That doesn't mean we shouldn't evaluate ourselves.

Sometimes something doesn't work because we weren't prepared. Sometimes our strategy was bad. Sometimes we mistook our ambition for God's instruction. Sometimes we need to humble ourselves, get counsel, learn, change, repent, or try something different.

Obedience is not an excuse for poor stewardship.

But neither should poor results automatically convince us that we missed God.

Those are two very different things.

Faithful.

That word continues to challenge me.

Because faithfulness means I can control my obedience even when I cannot control the outcome.

I can prepare.

I can pray.

I can work.

I can serve.

I can learn.

I can sacrifice.

I can steward what God placed in my hands.

But I cannot manufacture the fruit.

Paul explained this beautifully when talking about ministry in Corinth:

“I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth.”
— 1 Corinthians 3:6

My responsibility is planting and watering.

God is responsible for the growth.

That's freeing.

Because sometimes you'll plant something you never get to harvest.

Sometimes you'll water something someone else planted.

Sometimes you'll spend years preparing for something God will use in an assignment you don't even know exists yet.

Sometimes you'll build something that lasts.

Sometimes God will ask you to walk away from something you built.

Sometimes the thing you thought was the destination was actually training for where God was taking you next.

My identity cannot rise and fall with attendance.

My calling cannot rise and fall with applause.

My confidence in God's voice cannot rise and fall with whether everybody else understands what He told me.

And my definition of success cannot simply be whether the outcome looked impressive.

There will be things in ministry that look successful to people but were built through disobedience.

And there will be acts of obedience that look unsuccessful to people but receive the applause of heaven.

I'd rather have the applause of heaven.

At the end of my life, my greatest prayer isn't that people will be impressed by what I built.

I want to be able to say what Paul said:

“I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.”
— 2 Timothy 4:7

I want to finish what God gave me to finish.

Not someone else's race.

Not someone else's ministry.

Not someone else's calling.

Mine.

So when God tells me to go, I want to go.

When He tells me to stay, I want to stay.

When He tells me to build, I want to build.

When He tells me to release something, I want to release it.

When He gives me visible fruit, I want to steward it humbly.

And when obedience produces a season I don't understand, I want to trust Him anyway.

Because after fifteen years of ministry, I've learned that I can't always control the results.

But I can control my yes.

And ultimately, my success is measured by my obedience to God.