What does success look like to you? What does failure look like? We all would love to look back on our lives and careers as a great success for the Kingdom of God. But for many of us, the fear of potential failure can stop us before we even begin. For others, a brush with failure can make them never want to continue.

How do we equip ourselves to redefine success and failure in the mission field? Wycliffe USA missionaries Art Cooper, who serves as the spiritual vitality facilitator, and Brian McGeever, who’s the senior director of staff vitality, share three critical things we all must understand in light of success and failure.

1. Understand God’s Perspective

Although we might want to define our accomplishments (or even our identities) as successes or failures, that’s not what God does.

“God’s deepest desire is for a relationship with us, not our achievements,” Brian stated. “We should value the work he has given us to do. But we can’t take responsibility for the results. It's too easy for us to have an inflated sense of human contribution when it comes to God’s work. It’s his work. It’s not ours.” Instead Brian suggests we should think of successfulness as faithfulness or abiding in God.

Art agreed, reflecting on a time when he worked as a translation adviser with a language group in southeast Asia. He and his family had spent over a decade investing in the community. They built a team of local committed translators who started writing books, doing literacy work, engaging with local schools, and providing training and translating Scripture. “I thought, ‘Wow, finally! This is really moving! … We’re succeeding!’” Art remembered.

Then, after a severe disagreement among team members, suddenly everything fell apart. The entire team, including Art’s role, was completely dissolved. “All the work stopped,” Art recalled. He noted that it hurt more since the team members had become his friends.

Art said: “Reconciliation [in that culture] looked like being civil to one another, but not working together again.” But Art grieved the years that he’d spent training with the team. “It felt like failure. I kept wondering, ‘What should I have done differently?’ And just questioning and questioning.”

“I think that God’s repeated message to me was just to love them,” Art said. “We have to trust we know who God is and cling fiercely [to him]. … Sometimes we get to see glimpses of his glory and glimpses of what he's doing … [but] we don’t have the capacity to understand his thoughts and ways. But we do see the rain and the snow falling as in Isaiah 55, and we do see things growing and people being fed.”

What we might declare to be a failure, God sees in a totally different light as part of his plan.

2. Understand You’re Not Adequate

At some point in your missions career, you’re going to run into a situation where, despite all your efforts and training and skills, you won’t live up to your own expectations or the expectations of others. But as Art reminded, that’s a good thing!

“You probably aren’t adequate,” Art reflected. “And that’s a good thing to find out, albeit painful! But God is. And … we have the privilege of being invited into what he’s doing.”

Most missionaries are grateful for their weaknesses because it reminds them of God’s strength, goodness and just how much bigger his story is than our own!

Brian remembered a time in his missions career when both he and his wife were serving in high responsibility roles in Papua New Guinea. They didn’t have enough margin and support; they were burning out. “It took a friend coming to me to say, ‘Brian, it is time for you all to go home.’ What a sense of failure that was!”

After returning to the U.S., Brian found healing and encouragement through the guidance of a counselor and pastoral staff at his church who helped him understand the concept of failure in light of God’s Word.

“Go back, see what God said and who he is,” Art advised. “Get in the Word. Be still and silent. Find and recognize some of those traveling buddies God has given you and make sure you spend time with them. His actions toward us are loving-kindness and faithfulness. It may not look like loving-kindness right now and you may question his faithfulness, but our vision is too small.”

When we reframe what we view as failure as something that allows us to acknowledge our dependence on God and use it to draw closer to him, it’s no longer failure but a relationship.

3. Understand the Potential Trap

“Americans think about success and failure all the time,” Art said. “There’s incredible, incredible pressure to succeed.”

“It’s a trap that so many of us fall into,” Brian agreed. “Not just in the world of missions [but in] a work sense of identity. Missions must not become our idol.”

Brian emphasized the fact that our vocation is not the same as our identity, even though we may often conflate the two. He continued: “And if we can keep our identity as image bearers of Christ and children of God, then the temptation to allow other identities to creep in and set their roots … is much slimmer.”

Instead of listening to the voices and messages telling you that you’re not succeeding based on what you did or didn’t do, or who you did or didn’t become, Art’s encouragement is to focus on what God is doing.

“[God] is transforming us into the image of Christ,” Art said. “That’s part of God’s gift to us. That’s not a gift we deserve. We participate by receiving. ‘Success’ should be that I see the fruit of the Spirit coming out in my life or other people’s lives. … It doesn’t always look like what I’m doing.”

Keeping your eyes focused on Christ instead of being caught in feelings of failure is a process that requires growth and practice. When reflecting on a life altering season, Brian shared: “In the wake of that [experience], I’ve had moments of guilt and a sense of failure. But I’m able to … redirect my thoughts back to what we learned … and how God reoriented me on how to think about success and failure. A big part of that is self-forgiveness. That’s a work in progress for me.”

When we realize that our identities aren’t what vocation we have, we are freed from the notion that we are successes or failures based on what we do. Who we are isn’t defined by us: it’s defined by a loving God working in and through us. We can walk a marvelous and challenging journey up mountains and through valleys, knowing that every step of the way our loving God goes before us, beside us and behind us.