In Hope and the magic lottery, Seth Godin helpfully distinguishes between entrepreneurial hope (good) and the hope of the magic lottery ticket (bad).
It’s easy to transfer this distinction into the Christian life and the kind of sober and practical hope we should cultivate, but I thought there were two paragraphs especially useful for worn-out church planters and discouraged pastors. For church planters:
Starbucks didn’t become Starbucks by getting discovered by Oprah Winfrey or being blessed by Warren Buffet when they only had a few stores. No, they plugged along. They raised bits of money here and there, flirted with disaster, added one store and then another, tweaked and measured and improved and repeated. Day by day, they dripped their way to success. No magic lottery.
For pastors:
Here’s another way to think about it: delight the audience you already have, amaze the customers you can already reach, dazzle the small investors who already trust you enough to listen to you. Take the permission you have and work your way up. Leaps look good in the movies, but in fact, success is mostly about finding a path and walking it one step at a time.