Shopkeepers and Saints
Wednesday’s Compass | The Ruins | July 15
For new readers: The Compass is a newsletter on spiritual formation, and "The Ruins" is one of its recurring series. Every Wednesday it asks what the church was originally built to be — and what it might look like to build something that true again. Not nostalgia. Recovery.
Here’s what troubles me most about the drift that’s overtaken so much of the American church. It isn’t that churches stopped talking about discipleship. They didn’t. Walk into almost any congregation in North America and you’ll still hear the Great Commission quoted with a straight face: Go and make disciples. Nobody has rewritten that plaque. Nobody stands up and says Jesus got it wrong.
The language survived. That’s the sad part. If the vocabulary of discipleship had simply vanished, the drift would be easy to spot and easy to name. Instead, the words held their place on the wall while the actual work underneath them became something else. Crowd-building. Number-counting. Platform expansion. All of it celebrated and wearing the vestments of formation.
When in doubt, don’t believe the posters on the wall. Believe the actual work being done. Believe where the hours and the money actually went this week.
A Company of Shopkeepers
Eugene Peterson saw this coming decades ago, and he named it without blinking. In Working the Angles, he wrote that “the pastors of America have metamorphosed into a company of shopkeepers, and the shops they keep are churches.” Shopkeepers worry about keeping customers happy, luring them away from the shop down the street, packaging the goods so people will buy more. Some shopkeepers are remarkably good at it. They draw crowds. They raise money. They build reputations and platforms that other pastors want to study and replicate.
But it’s still shopkeeping. Religious shopkeeping, dressed in better language, but shopkeeping all the same.
If you’ve found your way here, welcome. The Compass exists to help you navigate the interior journey toward a deeper life with Jesus. If this lands somewhere real for you, subscribe and share it with someone who needs it. And if you’d like to try the paid side of things, there’s a free trial waiting, no pressure, just a chance to see what a month looks like: a spiritual formation practice tool each month, a teaching aid that expands it, and a live conversation to walk through it together. Start here whenever you’re ready.
Now, let’s keep walking.
Peterson borrowed a line from the Anglican priest Martin Thornton that has stayed with me since I first read it. A large, thriving congregation is fine, Thornton said, even fun. But “what most communities really need is a couple of saints.” Not a bigger shop. A couple of people who have actually traveled far into a deeper life with Jesus, whose lives have been slowly, quietly remade.
That’s the whole difference between the mission Jesus gave us and the work being done today under his name. A walloping congregation and a couple of saints are not the same achievement, and only one of them was ever the assignment.
I find it fitting, honestly, that Peterson uses the word ruins in that same book, describing the wreckage pastors walk into every day. But the ruins aren’t only out there in a broken world. As a pastor, I had to borrow plenty from that world myself: venue and seating, sound and amplification, budgeting practices, leadership structures. None of that is corrupting on its own. A microphone doesn’t care what it’s amplifying.
What I borrowed alongside those tools, without ever choosing to, was the world’s definition of success. Bigger. Faster. More measurable. That’s the part that quietly replaces the mission. The church cannot deliver its mission while measuring its fruit by the ruins’ own scorecard.The Commandments Nobody Wrote Down
Pete Scazzero has spent years naming the unwritten rules that govern unhealthy leadership, and one of them cuts straight to what I’m describing here. “It’s not a success unless it’s bigger and better,” he says. Nobody puts that on a denominational letterhead. But it runs the calendar of half the pastors I know, including, for years, my own.
Scazzero names a second commandment that I’ve carried with me ever since I first read it: superficial spirituality is treated as acceptable for leaders, as long as the machinery of ministry keeps running. A leader can be genuinely gifted at gathering a crowd and generating activity, and none of that guarantees he is leading anyone into an actual encounter with Jesus, including himself. Skill at production and depth of soul are not the same skill. It’s entirely possible to have one without the other, and a lot of us have proven it.
That’s the quiet tragedy underneath the loud one. It isn’t only that congregations got shaped around performance instead of formation. It’s that the leaders themselves were often never formed either. They got skilled instead. Those are different outcomes, and it is directly connected to the missional drift from formation to performance.
How a Mission Quietly Drifts
I’ve used the phrase missional drift to describe what happened to the American church, but it’s worth pausing to ask how drift actually works, because it isn’t unique to churches. Organizational researchers have studied this for decades in the nonprofit sector, and the pattern is remarkably consistent.
Mission drift is rarely a single dramatic decision. Researchers describe it as something closer to an undercurrent, one decision at a time, mostly unnoticed by the people inside the organization while it’s happening. A funding opportunity nudges the work sideways. A metric that’s easy to measure starts getting more attention than the harder-to-measure thing the mission actually cares about. Resources and recognition attach themselves to certain activities, and the organization gradually reorients around whatever gets rewarded, even when that pulls away from the founding purpose.
Harvard is the example researchers reach for most often, and it’s a striking one for a piece about pastors. Harvard was founded in 1636 to train Puritan clergy and to advance a specific religious tradition. Nobody voted to abandon that mission at some board meeting in year twelve. It slipped, decision by reasonable-sounding decision, until a school built to form ministers became something entirely different. Peter Greer and Chris Horst, who lead a faith-based nonprofit themselves, wrote an entire book on this pattern precisely because they watched it happen to organizations that started out every bit as convinced of their calling as any church plant.
Here’s what should make every pastor sit up. Researchers also note that organizations tend to prioritize their own survival over their original purpose once they’ve grown large enough to have a budget, a building, and a staff to protect. The institution starts protecting itself. That’s not cynicism about pastors. That’s just what organizations do, left unattended, and a church is an organization even though it is also something more.
So when a congregation starts measuring success by attendance and baptism counts instead of the slow, unglamorous work of transformed lives, that’s not usually one bad decision. It’s a hundred small ones, each defensible on its own, none of them chosen with the intent to abandon the mission. And when the world watches the church, commissioned specifically to make disciples, quietly drift into a numbers business instead, the cost isn’t only felt inside the church walls. The world loses its clearest picture of what a transformed life actually looks like.
The 90% Factor
I’ve told this story before, so I won’t dwell on it, but it belongs here because it’s the clearest window I have into my own shopkeeping. At the large church I served in Canada, I did my own rough accounting of where leadership hours actually went in a given week. About ninety percent of it went into making Sunday bigger, better, more impactful. The letterhead and the wall posters all said that our mission was discipleship. Everyone around me had simply accepted that a great Sunday gathering was the way you built disciples.
It isn’t. A great Sunday can support discipleship. It cannot substitute for it. I know that now because I lived in the substitution before I could see it clearly enough to say so.
What This Means If You’re Not a Pastor
If you’re reading this and you’re not in vocational ministry, I don’t want you to read the last few sections as pastor-bashing. Most pastors I know are exhausted, sincere, and genuinely hungry for more of God than their calendars currently allow. I once led a retreat for a church staff who were clearly starving for rest and depth, and their senior leader canceled it the next morning to chase a bus tour of a bigger, faster-growing church down the road. The hunger for God the staff carried deep inside them that week was completely real. Their leader was simply chasing something Jesus never once celebrated.
That’s no small part of why Lorri and I opened Stillpoint as an Oasis Rest retreat site. Not another retreat that shopkeeping can interrupt. No new strategies to make the church bigger. No agenda disguised as rest. A pastor, a missionary, or a ministry leader comes to Stillpoint to let the wounds ministry leaves finally get tended to and to begin building a life, and a ministry, around the way to a deeper life with Jesus.
So here’s the invitation for you. Pray for your pastor’s actual inner life, not just their sermons. Ask what would happen if your church measured depth before it measured breadth. And notice, gently, whether the language of discipleship in your own community matches the original mission Jesus gave us.
John Stott, near the end of his life, said the question that had followed him his whole ministry was simple: what is God’s purpose for his people? He arrived, he said, at one answer. God wants his people to become like Christ. Not bigger. Not more impressive. Like Christ.
Here’s the thing about a compass. You cannot recalibrate a working one so that it points to west and calls it true north. If the needle swings and settles on the wrong direction, the compass isn’t offering you an alternate route. It’s broken. And a broken compass is more dangerous than no compass at all, because it still points somewhere with total confidence. People follow it anyway.
That’s what happened here. The church didn’t lose its compass. It kept the compass, kept the word north stamped right there on the face of it, and let the needle drift until it was pointing at attendance, at platform, at a walloping congregation instead of a couple of saints. Nobody announced the recalibration. Nobody could have, because there’s no honest way to relabel west as north. It just slipped, a few degrees at a time, until leaders were navigating with total sincerity toward the wrong horizon.
True north never moved. It’s still a deeper, more transformative life with Christ, the same coordinate Stott spent his whole pilgrimage walking toward. The work now isn’t inventing a new compass. It’s admitting the old one drifted, and doing the slow, unglamorous work of pointing it true again.
Where do you see the needle pointing off true north, in your own church or your own leadership? I’d love to hear it in the comments.