Jesus told his followers that their agape (sacrificial, unconditional) love for one another would prove to the world that they were his disciples… does that apply to Christians that don’t really know each other? If you see someone with the fish on their business cards or car, should you give them the benefit of the doubt that they do believe, and leap at any chance to help them out?

Not that voting for someone in a popularity contest is necessarily helping them! But maybe there are other cases where favoring a fellow Christian for the sake of being a family member is actually the right thing to do, even if it naturally makes non-believers upset about favoritism.

What do you think?

Then maybe you will find encouragement in this.

At the local church the regular organist is a man with Alzheimers. While his short term memory is almost non-existent, his muscial ability remains intact (though far from perfect) and he is well loved by the congregation who could easily replace his mucial accompaniment with a more accomplished musician.
Instead they prefer to tolerate the musical imperfection and enable to the man to retain an active role within the church.

Excuse the rather lengthy response here, but I find the topic of excellence important. I have an average voice and I am an average guitar player. My wife is about a grade five or grade six in Piano, so there are many better than her as well.

It has been my privilege to lead worship in a variety of churches, denominations, and para-church settings. I have been doing this for most of the last 27 years. One of the things that I find most important in doing what we do at church, is having a commitment to quality. The things that we are doing we are doing “to the glory of God. God expects us to do our best at the tasks that he has given us.

For me, this commitment to quality means that on the Sundays that I am leading worship, many hours of preparation would have gone into planning in the previous week. Typically I spend 7-8 hours of preparation for every service.

Part of that commitment to excellence has been a mentoring process, and I have been fortunate to have some excellent mentors. The first guy to take me under his wing, many, many years ago is now a Covenant award winner and Juno nominee (the Canadian equivalent of the Dove and Grammy awards.) The point is that he was willing to take people much less talented than himself, but who had a heart for worship, and bring us along in understudy roles, to the point where we could lead on our own. I know that people like (Canadian) Brian Doerkson have also been very involved in mentoring worship leaders.

When we worship God we are worshiping the King of Kings. He deserves nothing but our very best, even if like me, our very best isn’t in human terms, all that good.