Excellence vs. Perfection

The question that keeps bouncing around in my mind as I attend lectures at the School of Congregational Development is what the difference is between excellence and perfection. I remember someone once explaining that an aspect of the baby-boomer mentality and the modern mentality was that is was oriented around just getting everything right, have the perfect, crisp, clean worship service. As I understand it, the post-modern, emerging worship style does not focus as much on perfection in worship but instead focus on making sure the worship service feels real.

How do we understand excellence as it exists both within perfection and outside of perfection? I certainly think that perfection requires a degree of excellence. Does perfection necessarily translate into meaningful excellence? What makes something excellent, and in particular when it comes to worship, how does this relate to perfection? Is perfection simply an expectation of a certain cross-section of our culture and society? The purpose of a lot of the ideas presented at the seminars I am attending seem to focus on making things perfect: we need perfect hospitality, perfect worship, and perfect follow through in order to achieve the excellence we are called to by God. While I will certainly agree that imperfections and mistakes can lead to people being turned away from the church for the wrong reasons. Does it follow though that if we just clean our act up, straighten everything out, and make sure that the worship service runs perfectly that we will see an increase in participation and impact? Is perfection sought by everyone or are there things that are much more important?

I am not sure how to best answers these questions that I am pondering. I cannot decide if my own issues with perfection come simply from my own less-than-perfect tendencies. As anyone who has read many of my posts can tell you, my ability to write is far from perfect. It would be possible to go back, checking each post carefully and make all the necessary changes. My wife in fact is very helpful in this regard, catching some of my more major ones for me. I am not sure the spirit of my blog centers in that perfect. I think a lot of my ideas are based more in imperfections. Does excellence mean remaining true to myself or mean striving for something else?

The more I think about this the more I am drawn to the idea that perfection is only one small part of excellence. I think that excellence is about living the fullest into who God is calling you to be. To try and reduce excellence simply to perfection, or perfect action, begins to remove the element of divine calling from what we are seeking to achieve. Perfection should not be a measure of arbitrary standards, such as grammatical correctness, or a lack of mistakes in the execution of worship and hospitality. Perfection should be a measure of whether or not we are living into God's vision and calling for us. I think perfection can become a false idol to worship, that somehow it will translate into something more than it is. It is easy to either undervalue or overvalue perfection, and I just want to better understand its place in all that is before me.