The Danger of Building the Wrong Thing
What if your greatest threat isn't failure — but succeeding at something Jesus never commissioned?
My fear is not that I fail. My fear is that I succeed at the wrong things.”
Alistair Begg
That stopped me cold the first time I heard it.
That’s not a warning for the half-hearted. That’s a warning for the driven.
The uncomfortable truth must be spoken: You can be busy for decades in ministry and never build what Jesus actually commissioned. You can accumulate years of experience, fill rooms, run programmes, grow platforms, and still be constructing something that has almost nothing to do with the Kingdom of Heaven.
We call it ministry experience. But experience doing what, exactly?
THE METRICS WE TRUST
We measure attendance. Giving. Social engagement. Events delivered. Years served.
None of those are wrong in themselves. But none of them are the metrics Jesus used either.
Jesus measured transformation. Disciples made. The poor hearing good news. Captives walking free. The least, the lost, and the last being found.
He didn’t commission us to build impressive organisations. He commissioned us to make disciples, people so formed in His likeness that they go and form others.
When those two things diverge, and they can quietly over years, we don’t always notice. Because the institution keeps growing even as the discipleship quietly hollows out.
SUCCEEDING AT THE WRONG THINGS
I’ve watched leaders, good people, sincere people, spend their most energetic years perfecting what Jesus never prioritised.
Polished Sunday productions that entertain but don’t transform. Structures that serve the organisation’s survival more than the Kingdom’s advance. Leadership cultures that gather people around a person rather than forming them around Jesus.
And the tragedy isn’t that they failed. The tragedy is that by most measures, they succeeded.
Full rooms. Loyal congregations. Respected names.
And yet... disciples? People sent out, empowered, multiplying? A community genuinely shaped by the Sermon on the Mount and the Great Commission?
That’s where the silence gets uncomfortable.
WHAT JESUS MODELED AND COMMISSIONED
Jesus spent three years not running a synagogue. He poured himself into twelve people. Eating with them, travelling with them, correcting them, sending them, calling them back, and sending them again.
His primary methodology was presence and formation, not programming and performance.
He commissioned that same method. Go and make disciples. As the Father sent me, so I send you.
Not: build the most impressive ministry infrastructure your generation has seen.
We are called to build according to the pattern of Christ, according to heaven’s priorities, not the patterns of religious culture or institutional momentum. And that pattern has one centre of gravity: disciples formed in Christ, sent by the Spirit, making disciples who make disciples.
The question every leader needs to sit with honestly, prayerfully, without defensiveness, is simply this: are the things I’m most invested in building actually what Jesus commissioned? Not are they good things. Not are they working by conventional measures. But are they this thing? The thing He asked for?
EXPERIENCE IS ONLY AS VALUABLE AS WHAT YOU’RE PRACTISING
Ten thousand hours of the wrong thing doesn’t produce mastery of the right thing.
Decades of running ministry events doesn’t automatically mean you know how to make disciples. Years of preaching to a crowd doesn’t mean you’ve learned how to form a person.
The experience that matters is experience doing what Jesus did. Investing in people, sending people, trusting the Spirit to multiply through people.
Everything else is scaffolding. And scaffolding was never meant to become the building.
A BETTER FEAR
Let Begg’s words do their work in you.
Don’t fear obscurity. Don’t fear small numbers. Don’t fear slow growth.
Fear building something impressive that Jesus never asked for. Fear arriving at the end of a ministry lifetime with a monument to your effort and a shortage of disciples. Fear succeeding, wildly, at the wrong things.
Because the Kingdom advances through a very specific thing. People formed in Christ, sent by the Spirit, making disciples who make disciples.
That’s the commission. That’s the model. That’s the only metric that will matter when we give account.
Build that.
Glenn Bleakney
Senior Leader, Awake Nations, Australia
President, Sent College
Kingdom Architecture — apostolic reformation, discipleship, and Kingdom theology Watch Kingdom Community Television at Kingdomcommunity.tv/apps