Getting Things Done: Plodding through the Valley of Abstraction

By Derek Penwell

“What’s the one thing you’d like to do before you die?”

That’s what I asked them. Five of us sitting around a table in a bar after a wedding. You know how those conversations usually go. Besides my wife, I hadn’t met any of the other people until the day before. But having learned that one woman was a marathoner who expressed no interest in running another one since she’d already accomplished her goal, it got me to thinking. I wondered if she had other big-ticket items on her life to-do list. So I asked everybody what big thing they’d like to accomplish before shuffling off this mortal coil.

One person said, “Play the piano.”

Another said, “Do a hand stand in yoga.”

Still another said, “Be published.”

All of these seemed like reasonable aspirations—not outrageous, like becoming an astronaut or becoming a pediatric neurosurgeon (which aspirations aren’t outrageous either, unless you happen to be on the downward side of middle age). “Doable,” I thought.

So, we talked in a meta-way about accomplishing goals—about how hard you have to work, and how consistently you have to show up. Generalities. It was a bar conversation, after all.

But if it had been in another setting—one that didn’t include a long day, a night of dancing and drinking—I probably would have said, “Ok. So, how are you going to accomplish your goal?”

Look, I’m nobody’s life coach. But I know how this stuff works. Having a goal and accomplishing a goal are the same distance apart as fireflies and fire.

Usually, when I ask that question, “How are you going to accomplish your goal?” what I get is the econo-size box of hesitation. “Um … well … ”

So, the next step (there almost always has to be) is to ask, “What’s the first thing you’d have to do to achieve your goal?”

More hesitation. People find abstraction much more comfortable to live with, since it doesn’t really cost anything to think big thoughts. “Well, I guess, I’d have to … um … well … “

Simple. Just keep it simple. Practical. What’s the first physical thing you’d have to do to start following through on your goal?1 If you’re going to learn to play the piano, what’s the first thing you’d need to do?

“Find a piano teacher?”

How? You need to be specific. Ask a friend? Call the local music shop?

“Call the local music shop.”

How?

“On the phone.”

You’ve got the number of the local music shop on speed dial?

“Oh, I’d have to look it up.”

How? In the Yellow Pages? Google it?

“Google it.”

There you go. If you’re going to learn to play the piano, the first step is to Google the phone number of the local music shop.

Now, you think I’m a pedantic twit. You’re not alone. Believe me.

But until people get that specific, they’ll never learn to play the piano. Because playing the piano is hard. You learn step-by-step, day after day. Most people know that, which is why they either put it off, or they keep the idea of learning to play the piano conceptual (which might just be the same thing).

Congregations are really good at abstraction. What would your congregation like to accomplish?

“We’d like to grow.”

Without getting too deeply into what you mean by “grow,” how are you going to accomplish that? (What congregations mean by “grow” will generally be evident in their answer about how they intend to grow. Usually, they mean something having to do with bodies and cash.)

“Um … well … we could get some young families.”

How do you propose to “get” these young families?

“We could hire a young minister.”

What do you suppose your “old” minister would say to that?

“Good point. We could have more programs that appeal to young families.”

Ok. What kinds of programs? Vacation Bible School? Upward Bound Soccer League? Day care?

“A family movie night. And we could invite people from the neighborhood.”

Now we’re cooking with gas. What would you have to do first?

“Get permission.”

To show a family movie?

“Fine. We’d need to decide on a movie.”

Who’s “we?”

“The fellowship committee.”

I would think choosing a movie wouldn’t need a motion in a committee meeting, but it’s your church. How are you going to get the committee to decide on the movie?

“I guess I could just email them and ask.”

So, at least in this person’s mind, the first physical act necessary to help your church grow would be writing an email.

I know that sounds overly fussy, but ideas (even good ones) will remain ideas until somebody bothers to pick up the phone, or send out an email, or shop on the Internet. Worthy aspirations are even worthier if you actually pursue them. And to pursue them you need to break down a big idea into manageable actions.

The larger point, though, is that congregations are notorious for keeping things vague. There’s safety in vagueness, in never starting. It’s difficult to fail at something you never actually try.

The secret: If you’re ever going to do anything interesting, personally or corporately, you’re going to have to plod through the valley of abstraction and set up camp in the world of actual work, where practical things like attending to details actually matters.

________________

1. Just so we’re clear, I’m not an organizational genius. I get this “first step” thing from David Allen’s, Getting Things Done. Do yourself a favor, and read it. It’ll change your game.

True Grit: Why Congregations Need to Know When to Quit (and When to Hang on)

By Derek Penwell

I quit.

I used to say that when I was younger … more than I like to remember. Wrong coach. Wrong teacher. Wrong boss.

Of course, I’ve quit some things that were well worth quitting.

I quit the violin in fourth grade, because I could barely manage to make it sound like anything less than two love-starved Carpathian Marmots in the throes of passion.

I was a horrible boy scout, inasmuch as I thought sleeping outdoors in a cotton/poly-blend sack on the hard cold ground a fool thing to do. Moreover, I don’t even like properly heated Chef Boyardee, let alone the gelatinous squares glopped from between the jagged edges of a can opened with the little used implement on a $7 Swiss Army knife knock-off.

I worked at a Ziebart, rust-proofing the undersides of cars against the ravages of Michigan winters. I came home from that place looking like Rambo after a night spent in the rain-soaked climes of the Pacific Northwest with only a Ka-Bar knife and the song in my heart to keep me company.

I sold Icecapade tickets for disabled children as a telemarketer in the back of an old H&R Block building one summer, with a besotted Nick Nolte look-a-like threatening to give all the good leads “TO SOMEBODY WHO CAN ACTUALLY SELL WORTH A &%#@!”

I worked at a church one time that sucked my soul like an Electrolux plugged into a 220 V outlet during a power surge. I was a half inch shorter by the time I quit that one.

Some things I take pride in having quit.

But there are other things I would like to have stuck with.

I wish I hadn’t quit the guitar.

I wish I hadn’t let some of my languages slide.

I wish I hadn’t stopped writing that novel … or that other novel.

Knowing when to hang on and when to quit is, I suspect, something of an art, rather than a science. It has more to do with plot structure or composition than with empirical verifiability or equations.

Part of the problem stems from our inability to know which voices to listen to, and which to ignore.

Social media, which opens us up to a much more insistent set of opinions often only serves to complicate things. I have people who are simultaneously telling me to shut up, while others are telling me to talk louder. Some people apparently believe that I’m Satan’s advocate, while others tell me I’m doing the Lord’s work.

In my better moments I can find the necessary reserves to tune out those who would like nothing better than to see me quit the things I find most important to do. In many moments, though, those voices seem loudest, their warnings most dire.

How do we know when quitting is in everyone’s best interest, and when quitting is the sucker’s way out, that if we’d just hang on a bit longer, our initial instincts would be vindicated?

This is a difficult question, since a lot seems to ride on the ability to persevere through doubt and distraction. It turns out, though, that one of the greatest predictors of personal success isn’t brute intellectual force, but the ability to press on in the face of adversity and doubt. According to Angela Duckworth the highest predictor of success is self-control, not self-esteem. That is to say, students who excel are those who have what she calls “grit,” rather than those who are the smartest and who feel the best about themselves.

In a brief article for the American Psychological Association about Duckworth, E. Packard writes: “Backbone, chutzpah, fortitude, guts, stick-to-it-iveness: All words that describe what separates brilliant slackers from the simply talented who excel through a passionate yet steady approach.”

Having spent the better part of my adult life in post-secondary education I can attest to the insight: the people who do well in school (and, I would suggest, life) aren’t the brightest, but the most dogged—those capable of identifying the good among a host of competing voices, and pursuing it … even though the prevailing wisdom seems unanimous in its prediction of failure.

Clearly, there are some things worth quitting. The trick, though, is not only knowing what’s worth quitting, but why.

Congregations, it seems to me experience this sort of conundrum. Facing decline, anxious congregations capable of working up the necessary courage to try something new often lack the patience to see it succeed. Expecting that everything has to have—if not an immediate payoff, then—a payoff that shows results pretty dang quick.

“But we just started our cat shaving ministry last month!”

“Yes, but it seems to be going nowhere. We thought it would have a greater impact on the spiritual pilgrims in the cat shaving world. Alas …”

On the other hand, there are some things these congregations can’t quit, despite the fact that continuing to hang onto them is like clinging to the alligator as it does its death roll.

“We think that given a bit more time our lace doily making ministry is bound to catch on with the younger generation.”

“But we started it in 1946. We got our last new doily maker in 1972. We shouldn’t rush into any big decisions, but, you know, maybe it’s time to start thinking about going in a different direction.”

Some things are worth quitting.

But there are other things that congregations do on which they ought to take a longer range perspective—not least because ministry should be done for its own sake, because it’s the right thing to do.

Ministry, after all, isn’t about getting what we want, it’s about God getting what God wants.

Those who follow the crucified Jesus shouldn’t be surprised to find out that sticking with a losing proposition sometimes works out in the end.

The Blessed Mercy of Driving the Wrong Car

By Derek Penwell

I knew a young woman one time who, when she turned sixteen, was promised a car to drive. Needless to say, she was pretty stoked about the prospect of having her own wheels. She knew exactly what she wanted, too. This young woman wanted a new Camaro. She’d done her homework, so she knew just which option packages she wanted, all the bells and whistles. A fairly ambitious set of desires; but you’ve got to dream, right?

On the day she turned sixteen, she was ready to go with her parents down the dealership and order this fine piece of American engineering. Her dad poked his head in the door from outside and said, “Hey, sweetie! Come on out here. Mom and I have a surprise for you.”

She got up from the breakfast table and ran toward the door. She figured that this was even better than she expected. Her parents had anticipated her desires, and had gone out to surprise her by getting her the car of her dreams. Almost impossible to contain her excitement.

But as she cleared the side door and looked out in the driveway, what awaited her there wasn’t a new Camaro, but a ten year-old Pontiac Bonneville. Huge thing. It was the color of a rusted boat anchor. Looking at her “new” car, the birthday girl was crestfallen. She shot a glance at her parents. “But I wanted a Camaro,” she pouted.

Her dad said, “People in Hell want ice water. You don’t always get your first choice. This is a good car—it runs well and it’s safe.”

She broke down in tears. “Well, I’m not driving that thing around town. What will my friends think?”

And she didn’t drive it, at least for a while … until she couldn’t stand staying at home doing nothing. Then all of a sudden that Pontiac Bonneville didn’t look so bad. (Well, actually it did still look bad, but you know what I mean.)

I think about that Bonneville when I hear congregations complaining about not being who they think they should be, about not having the kind of resources to do really “important” work. You ever hear that kind of self-pity coming out of a congregation?

“We’re so small. We look at other congregations, and we’re embarrassed about what we have to offer. We don’t have a family life center. No sparkling youth program. Our ability to send our outreach dollars to the home office has been severely hampered. The whole thing is just really depressing.”

And often these congregations, because they have so little confidence, end up doing very little. Actually, let me rephrase that: These congregations end up doing very little of anything new or brave or exciting. Despairing of ever being Camaros, they’ve failed to understand that being a Pontiac Bonneville is still enough to get the job done.

What’s the job?

Of a car? To take you from point A to point B. And, given the constraints of speed limits (as well as the laws of physics), a well maintained Bonneville can do that as well as a Camaro.

What’s the job of a congregation?

To worship God and help equip followers of Jesus for the reign of God.

And here’s the thing: You can do that without a family life center, without a sparkling youth program, and without a lot of extra money.

You shame the angels if you don’t live bravely with what you have.

5 Questions Congregations Should Ask Themselves

By Derek Penwell

I read stories about all these congregations doing amazing things, launching new programs to pair homeless people with vacant properties, rallying around a harassed Islamic community, creating wonderful spaces for prayer and meditation, gleaning food from local producers to feed the hungry. I’m grateful these congregations take their faith seriously enough to actually find new and creative ways of living it out. But seeing the wealth of creativity some churches demonstrate can be discouraging if you feel like you’re a part of a congregation that doesn’t seem to have the resources to do wonderful, Ted Talk kind of stuff.

I recently went to a conference, sponsored by the Center for Progressive Renewal, at which we discussed trend lines in the culture that the church should being paying attention to. One of the trend lines is the sharing economy.

The sharing economy is predicated on the assumption that we create or increase value by partnering with others to share our resources. Uber, a ride sharing service, for instance, matches people who have cars with people who need rides. By paying you, who doesn’t have the overhead of a taxi company, for a ride, I get a cheaper means of conveyance, and you get money to give me space in your car that would be otherwise go unoccupied. Pretty slick, right?

The only way that a sharing economy works, however, is if there’s trust that what we’re doing isn’t trying to figure out ways to take advantage of each other—which is, of course, exactly what our capitalist systems assumes. In the predominant paradigm of the twentieth century—the Industrial economy—value is created by producing stuff, and then convincing as many people as possible that they need to buy it at prices that maximize profits. Under such an arrangement, because maximizing profits is the engine that drives the economic system, we need to enter into contractual agreements because I feel that I have no choice but to suppose that, given half a chance, you’re going to screw me. I may not know how at this point, but I’m pretty sure that’s the likely outcome.

In a sharing economy, on the other hand, I begin with a different set of assumptions—namely, that we participate in a different kind of arrangement in which generosity, instead of self-interest, is the way to create value. In this system maximizing profit isn’t the driving force, but the belief that participating in a system built on trust, which benefits everyone, is both more satisfying and sustainable. That trust is built on a continued demonstration of my commitment to maintaining a relationship with you that supersedes my desire to angle for an advantage. In other words, I must show that I’m in this not just to get something from you, but because I believe a culture of generosity is more beneficial to everyone, and that if you trust me, you’re more likely to want to continue a mutually beneficial relationship.

One aspect of the sharing economy in particular, though, that has wonderful and life altering implications for the church is the assumption that you share what you have, not what you think you should have. That is to say, in a culture of generosity we begin with the belief that everyone has gifts to share. You share your gifts; I share my gifts; and together we create something valuable that affirms the dignity and worth of both of us. I don’t have to have your gifts to be successful, because you already have them. I don’t have to be Checker Cab to contribute; I just have to be willing to use the car I have.

Unfortunately, because of the way things currently stand, too many congregations waste time worrying that—at least as they’re presently constituted—they have nothing of value to share. So, rather than spending time perfecting and sharing the gifts they do possess, they expend priceless energy worrying that they don’t have somebody else’s gifts. The problem with mega church culture isn’t that congregations are big, but (at least in part) that bigness is used as the de facto standard by which we measure faithfulness.

But what about this?

1. What if congregations gave up the illusion that there’s something out there that, if they could just get their hands on it, would make them everyone’s first choice for the ecclesiastical prom?

2. What if congregations started figuring out what they already have, worked to perfect it, then offered it up to the world in a reckless demonstration of generosity?

3. What if we started to view the gifts God has given us as sufficient to do the work God has for us, instead of standing around and complaining that God hasn’t given us enough to work with to do really “important” stuff?

4. What if we got lost not in what we aren’t, but in what we could be if we ever chose to make our own little corner of the world a haven of welcome and grace?

5. What if we stopped worrying about whether our gifts will provide any benefit to us (e.g., more young families, bigger budgets, new Christian aerobics classrooms, etc.), and just give them away so that others might benefit from them?

But why would we do that?

Let me propose a simple but radically subversive, turn-the-world-on-its-head kind of answer: Because that’s what Jesus told us to do.

Church Buildings and Plastic Couch Covers

By Derek Penwell

Growing up I had a friend whose family had a formal living room. I’m not sure why they had a formal living room, since they got just about as much use out of it as the crawl space under the stairs, which always seemed prone to flooding. But having a formal living room was a big deal … I guess in case the President or K.C. and the Sunshine Band stopped by to visit.

And while the President and Mr. Sunshine Band would have been welcome to sit on the plastic couch cover, ordinary human beings were not. It was a place set aside for some ultra special event that everybody believed might one day occur, and for which no one wanted to be unprepared. And so it languished in all its Teak-paneled and shag-carpeted glory, its uncomfortable looking orange couch and lacquered end tables gathering dust.

Not that it looked like a great place, either to play or relax, but I always harbored a secret desire to sneak into that living room and start moving the macraméed owl wall hangings and the vases filled with big glass balls around. I knew such hijinks in the forbidden room would be stroke-inducing to the people in charge, but dang, it felt like it needed to be done.

I suspect the need to have a perfectly preserved room (even if it looked like a touching/creepy homage to the Partridge Family) stemmed from the desire of working class folks to have nice things. Many of the folks in that generation had come of age in the aftermath of the Depression, World War II, and then the cultural pre-pubescence of the 1950s. Having nice things for certain social classes in this generation was still a relatively new phenomenon. Like domestic police, the impulse to “preserve and protect” seemed a natural response to the rapidly shifting political and cultural forces reshaping the American landscape.

“Get out of the living room!” and “You better not spill anything on the good furniture!” became the new suburban rallying cries. Some rooms were for everyday, and some rooms were for … well, never.

I preferred the family rooms of my youth to the living rooms—the former to be used, dirtied, broken, and restored, the latter to be encased in harvest gold amber, and to be later excavated by post-apocalyptic anthropologists looking to explain the domestic habits of late twentieth-century bourgeoisie.

Unfortunately, not only were the aesthetics of this time ecclesiastically enshrined in church buildings [Seriously? Burnt orange upholstery on the pews? Have you seen this?], but in many congregations so were the attitudes about church buildings as special places to be protected against all human encroachment, preserved for some special purpose at a distant point on the horizon of time.

Look, I’m not saying that there shouldn’t be places in a church that are set apart as holy space. The sanctuary probably shouldn’t double as the gym for the Day Care during the week. The baptistry probably shouldn’t house hidden jacuzzi nozzles for staff parties. We probably shouldn’t eat our Cap’n Crunch out of the offering plates. Fine.

Let me be clear, I’m thinking less about the use of particular rooms in a church than about the church building itself. In many people’s minds the church building has become the plastic-wrapped living room that should be safeguarded against the invasion of sticky-fingered people bent on messing it up.

But what if the church building was recast as a family room, to be used, dirtied, broken, and restored?

What if we turned loose of the idea that churches are antiques to be collected, rather than tools to be used to accomplish some purpose?

What if congregations took a chance and let the community use their space as a gift to those with whom they live and work, instead of defaulting to suspicion of motives or fear of what might happen?

Declining mainline denominations have these huge legacy buildings, sucking up more and more resources. What if congregations said, “We’re going to think about this building as a launching pad, rather than a saddle?”

Mistakes will certainly be made. It’s going to get messed up. Somebody’s inevitably going to spill something on the plastic couch covers; somebody’s going to move the owl hangings and leave beer can rings on the lacquered end table.

So, fix it … or learn to love beer can rings.

People visit museums; they don’t live in them.

Give Yourself a Bre

By Derek Penwell

I played baseball in college. The first half of my freshman year went fairly well. At least I didn’t embarrass myself too much.

The second half, though, was a nightmare. I got into a terrible slump that I couldn’t get out of. I changed my batting grip. I changed my batting stance. I changed my batting gloves. Nothing worked.

After some weeks, I’d completely lost patience with myself. I was pressing … hard.

One of my coaches, who hadn’t said much to me throughout my struggles, finally took me aside and said, “It looks like you’re trying to hit two home runs in one at-bat. You’re thinking too much. Let your body do what it knows how to do. You’ve practiced and practiced. Now let your body do the work.”

And I said, “Yeah, but what if that doesn’t work? What if I don’t ever get another hit?”

Coach said, “You can’t control what happens to the ball after you do what you’ve trained to do. Muscle memory. You can only control the swing you’ve practiced. And if you’ve done it correctly—and you have, because I’ve made sure of that—it’ll eventually work itself out. You’ve got to quit thinking so much. What? Do you think you're Ty Cobb?  Give yourself a break.”

I over-think just about everything, and I’m not good at giving myself a break.

Writing is the same way. You do something you really like, and some other folks seem to like it too. Then, the next thing you do (which you also like) barely raises a yawn. Then, you produce several yawners in a row, and you start to think that maybe you’ve managed a couple of flukes, but now everybody has wised up and can see what a fraud you are. And you’re convinced that they’ll never read anything you’ve written again. (I’ve been assured by other writers that this is a thing—that it’s not just me.)

The temptation when you hit a dry patch in writing is to try to think, think, think of something new and important to say—something that will drive page views or book sales (or whatever measuring stick for success you happen to be employing).

You start pressing, start trying to hit two home runs in every at-bat. So, you write stuff like “Fourteen Reasons the Church Needs to Be More Like Lady Gaga.”

But writing also has its own version of muscle memory. Writers write because they can’t not write, which means that they write for the love of the act writing and not for the results writing produces.

Why?

Because you can’t control what happens after you push “submit,” after you send your work out into the ether. You trust that your writing muscles will remember what to do, and do it. And you trust that what comes from that will be a good representation of all the time and energy you’ve sunk into throwing words up on a screen. What people do or don’t do with it, you can’t control.

Struggling congregations often look like slumping hitters who can’t catch a break or writers who believe their best words have already found their way onto the paper. They press. They catastrophize. You can smell the fear of failure, the neediness for approval all over them.

Congregations in decline start thinking how they might change their luck (“because, you know, we’ve got to do something or we’re going to die”). Rather than trust themselves, they start thinking about gimmicks that will break the slump.

“I heard about a church out in Kansas that did this thing on Tuesday nights with a calliope, a tattoo artist, and bears on unicycles. Maybe we should check into that.”

But, assuming you’ve thought and prayed about the ministries you engage, and that you have something to offer, what you need to focus on is remaining faithful to your best lights.

When it comes to congregations, what do I mean by “remaining faithful to your best lights?”

Here’s what I mean: congregations should spend time discerning where God is leading, and then head in that direction. If the community is convinced that it’s the right way to go, then go and quit worrying that somebody else knows a shortcut that you don’t know.

You have to get over the mistaken notion that you can engineer the results you want. Muscle memory. You do what you do the best you know how to do it, and then you let God take responsibility for the results.

Does that mean if something’s obviously not working you shouldn’t change?

Let me take a different tack for a moment. Don’t confuse tactics with strategy. Strategy is a direction. Tactics are a path. If you’re headed east, several paths may take you there. If you find that one path doesn’t work, don’t feel guilty about stopping and heading down another one. But you need to remain convinced that east is where you need to go.

That’s a lot of metaphors for one post. The point is, congregations need to look to God for the kind of work they need to be doing. Then, they need to do that work as often and as well as possible. Finally, they need to let God worry about results.

Give yourself a break.

What If Small Is the New Big?

By Derek Penwell

Bookstores and Our Relationship to “Bigness”

As a kid growing up, almost all of the bookstores I knew about were found in malls—B. Dalton and Walden Books. You could expect to find one (sometimes two if the mall were big enough) in almost every mall. These bookstores didn’t carry an extensive inventory—mostly best sellers, coffee table books, children’s books, magazines, and so on. The experience was about buying—browse if you must, but find what you want, buy it, then get back to the rest of your business at the mall. They had no chairs, no coffee. It was a place to stop in and take a break from doing something else. The strategy wasn’t about great selection; it was about ubiquity: “We’re everywhere, and if we don’t have it, we can order it.”

As the 1990s unfolded, however, the ubiquity of mall bookstores began to decline. People’s relationship to books and the stores that sold them began to change with the increasing popularity of a couple of new chains, Borders and Barnes & Noble, and their imitators. These stores carried much more substantial inventory, and they appealed to people’s book buying experience. These new bookstores made an attempt to appear like a cross between a retail library and a coffee shop—come in, browse, relax, read a little, and have a latte. They provided comfortable chairs that they actually seemed to want you to sit down in, new and interesting music softly played, grad students with tattoos and multiple piercings, and a crap ton of books that allowed you to discover new authors and subjects you didn’t know about. The strategy was about great selection and an inviting experience—”We’ve got stuff you didn’t even know you wanted, which you get to explore at your leisure.”

But as the Internet realized popularity, a new kind of book buying experience emerged—online shopping, led principally by Amazon. Amazon and the other online bookstores boasted a nearly exhaustive inventory that could be accessed from the comfort of your own living room. What they gave up in ambience, they made up for in convenience. Not only could you order books and have them shipped straight to your door, you could order just about anything else—from TVs to hernia belts. The strategy centered on almost unlimited selection available with unbelievable convenience—”We’ve got just about everything, and you don’t even have to put down your Mountain Dew to get it.”

Things really started to change, however, with the advent of e-books. Amazon introduced digital books that gave people the convenience of online ordering coupled with instant online delivery. There was almost no waiting at all. You could have a new book in seconds, no matter where you were.

Still, after the big chain bookstores almost crushed them, and after Amazon and e-books almost crushed the big chain bookstores, some local independent bookstores have managed not only to survive, but to thrive. How do they do it?

Here’s where a really good writer might offer the winning strategy, distilled to its essence: The thing that makes some small independent bookstores succeed in the land of the giants is __________.

But if there is a strategy, distilled to its essence, I don’t know what it is. Of course, I have some ideas—an emphasis on niche marketing, an appeal to customer service, a local community atmosphere. I imagine all those things, and probably some others, have contributed to the success of certain small independent bookstores.

What I want to focus on is the broader reality of bigness. For years the roadmap to success appeared to wend its way through Mega-ville. Go big or go home, right? Walmart. Microsoft. McDonalds. Google. The New York Yankees. Hollywood blockbusters. Page views. Empire.

In fact, so closely did success seem to correlate with bigness that—at least informally, if not explicitly—that’s gradually how success came to be defined. Biggest is best.

When Big Became Small

But the narrative of bigness has bumped up against some difficult realities. For one thing, a market that is increasingly fragmented by the vagaries of demographic diversity—race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and gender expression … not to mention, the perennial issue of the range of individual taste—is difficult to dominate in a general way. When a culture is largely homogenous, generating broad appeal is much easier—you only need to get a couple of things right to saturate the market. When the market is fragmented, however, broad appeals are almost impossible, since whatever you offer will almost certainly exclude wide swaths of the population.

For another thing, with the increasing presence of the Internet, and it’s almost endless platforms for publishing and marketing, the signal to noise ratio is as high as it’s ever been. So, while it’s easier now than ever to get your message out, your message is one among millions. Being heard is both easier and more difficult, in that your message is easier to broadcast to a potential audience, but because there are so many voices, it can be more difficult to have your message actually heard. Time was you could craft a message, publicize it through traditional media, and have a reasonable chance of having it being heard by your intended audience. If you were quick enough, properly resourced, and sufficiently smart, you might run the table. Boom! Big. Nowadays, however, mass appeals untailored to highly specific audiences have difficulty making connections.

No question but that bigness still exists. And where it does, it’s really big … huge, in fact. (Think Apple, Walmart, Google, Comcast, Verizon, American Airlines). But it’s becoming rarer and rarer.

Small and local are also thriving (Think Farmers Markets, CSAs, Record Stores, Community Ministries). What we have less and less of is moderately big (Think Montgomery Ward, Circuit City, Newsweek, Borders, My Space). A large swath in the middle—including much that would traditionally have been called large—finds itself being squeezed on both ends.

So, maybe we need to rethink the endgame. Maybe our understanding of success needs recalibration.

* What if scrambling to be a monopoly is a waste of time?

* What if “mega” scares off more people than it attracts?

* What if, as Seth Godin has suggested, small is the new big?

I want to suggest that these are questions denominations and congregations should be considering just now.

Why the Church Needs to Quit Reading the Box Scores

By Derek Penwell

Patience is not a purchasable commodity.

And if you think it is, you’re both–probably in the market and unlikely to find it.

"Well, that’s just dumb. Of course, you can’t buy patience."

Ok. Maybe that’s a bit of a straw man. After all, nobody’s under the misimpression that you can go to Wal-Mart and pick up the econo-size box O' patience.

On the other hand, there are plenty of people willing to part with the money to purchase things that they think will make patience irrelevant, people willing to buy stuff that promises to do for them what only patience and hard work can actually accomplish.

Why do you think people buy Thigh Masters and soon-to-be-lapsed gym memberships in January?

I remember years ago, just after I quit smoking, thinking, “I wish I had years of non-smoking under my belt, right now.”

It doesn’t work that way, though. If you want to be an ex-smoker, there’s no shortcut, beyond just piling up time not smoking.

Patience is difficult, just to the extent that it's an admission that some things lie outside the realm of our control. It would be nice to think that engineering outcomes through cleverness or sheer force of will is always a possibility. Alas, some things can’t be planned into submission, just because we really want them.

That is not to offer excuses for not planning, which is usually an integral part of achieving one’s goals. It is, rather, a caveat to remind us that no matter how passionate or how well organized, success at some things cannot be achieved absent the bone-crushing passage of time.

The need for patience is no less necessary when it comes to congregational transformation.

As with diet and exercise, there’s a whole industry that has made a lot of money playing to people’s impatience when it comes to healthy congregations. Now, I don’t want to be misunderstood to be saying that all commercial efforts to help churches heal are cynical attempts to aid the process whereby churches and their money are soon parted. I’m not necessarily questioning anyone’s sincerity who makes a living telling congregations how to get healthy. I think there can be no denying, however, that it would be much tougher to sell books and seminars in this industry without the obdurate cultural belief that something can be had for nothing–or at least, if not “nothing,” then very little in the way of an investment in time and hard work.

Here’s the thing: Healthy turnarounds in diets and congregations are measured in unsatisfying increments of time–which is to say, time that extends beyond people’s initial enthusiastic expectations. There’s no healthy way, for example, to lose 25 pounds in a week–except, perhaps, with the excision of a particularly rare tumor or some such. Likewise, congregations, which often measure health in purely quantifiable ways (membership, budget, worship attendance, etc.) pay too much attention to the box scores, thinking that–given the recent visioning process, or the new youth minister hire, or the addition of a “praise band”–increasingly large numbers must surely be just around the corner.

Box scores, while a helpful metric for judging performance in baseball, don’t always tell the whole tale in the church (or necessarily even in baseball). Eagle-eyeing the box scores is a symptom of impatience, of believing that congregational health is reducible to numbers.[1] The goal of baseball is winning, not piling up impressive statistics.

The truth of the matter is, though, impatience in the case of congregational transformation can be deadly, because it continues to place unrealistic expectations on systems incapable of living up to them. Practically speaking, it is neither realistic nor healthy for churches to expect steroidal box scores tomorrow–or by the next time we draw up the budget. Living life by box scores is a recipe for despair.  Believe me.  I know.  I'm a Chicago Cubs fan.

Not only is impatience a practical problem, though; it’s a theological one. Patience is a theological virtue for a reason. Christians are an eschatological people–which is to say, Christians are a people caught between the “now” and the “not yet,” between the “promise” and the “fulfillment.” We live with the paradox that the war has already been won, when all signs seem to indicate that the battle is still being waged. We are called to a radical hope that can only be sustained by a patience that allows us to say, “We can’t quite yet see how God is working out God’s purposes, but we will continue to live as though those purposes are already accomplished.”

Impatience, when it comes to congregational transformation, from a theological perspective, is the damning admission that our hope in God has been supplanted by our confidence in our own resources to produce the results we think are most important–that is, box scores. That’s the rub: Our impatience is not only a statement about who we are and what we think we’re capable of, it’s also an implicit assertion about who God is and what God is capable of—or, perhaps better, what God is incapable of.

A people shaped by hope cannot but cultivate patience as the very virtue that most clearly articulates a belief that our lives (and the lives of our congregations) are not our own–they are a gift. And there’s no way to quantify that gift in such a way that it will fit in a box score.

____________________

1. Yes, I realize keeping an eye on those numbers is important. My argument is not that those numbers are unimportant, but that they’re not definitive.  ↩

Penwell's Law of Travel and Why Churches Need to Plan for Failure

By Derek Penwell 

Boy, howdy, do I get cranky on the first day of vacation!

For months I look forward to the time off. I do all that pre-vacation planning, thinking about how long we’ll drive each day, where we’ll stop to eat, the kind of hotel that can accommodate five people. I like the planning.

The packing, though? I don’t like the packing. In particular, I don’t like the “getting-out-of-the-house” part. It always takes exactly two hours longer to leave than I planned. There invariably seems to be one more thing that, if it gets left behind, will mean certain calamity—medicine, power cords, the six year-old’s nebulizer.

And I tend to take out my frustrations on my family. For the first hour in the car I’m a sullen jerk. I don’t want to be a jerk. Nobody wants me to be a jerk. But there I am privately (or if you ask my family, not so privately) seething about the fact that now we’re two hours behind my meticulously thought out schedule.

Except it’s not that meticulously thought out, is it? I never seem to factor in the two extra hours that, no matter how much we’ve packed and prepared the night before, it takes to get on the road. So, either because of my poor planning or my bad memory (or more likely, some combination of the two) my family has to start its time together with a Dad who blames everybody but himself for the late start and the bad mood he’s in.

It strikes me that often churches also start new journeys with much of the same kind of crankiness. Churches plan. The good ones plan some more. And the really good ones try to anticipate in advance the problems they’re sure to encounter along the way.

The problem, though, is that you can never anticipate all the wrinkles that will inevitably throw off your scrupulous preparations. No matter how methodical you are, you’re still going to leave your contact case behind.

Call it Penwell’s Law of Travel: No matter how hard you plan, you’re still going to leave something important behind, still going to wind up with a bad radiator thirty miles outside of Des Moines, still going to find yourself in a smoking room at the Holiday Inn Express (when you very clearly told the reservations manager that you have kids with asthma, and so cannot possibly take a smoking room).

A version of the same law applies to churches: No matter how hard you plan, you’re still going to have someone forget to remind the AA group that they can’t have the fellowship hall on Friday night when you launch your soup kitchen, still going to wind up forgetting to make sure that the heat gets turned up in plenty of time before the attendees show up for the new adult day care center and start complaining about how “it feels like a meat-locker in here,” still going to find yourself playing host to a surly group of young adults who are pretty sure somebody promised there’d be beer at the Bible study kick-off.

So, the question isn’t “Will something go wrong?” The question is “How are you going to respond when something goes wrong?”

Churches in decline tend to obsess over the accidents, the mistakes, the unforeseen misadventures. In fact, so afraid are they of mistakes, so undone are they by accidents that they will use the memories of those things as an excuse for never launching out into the unknown again.

Mistakes, to struggling churches, are viewed as an enemy and accidents as a moral failure of planning. The problem with undertaking a journey with these prejudices is that it fails to take into account Penwell’s law: something is going to go wrong, be forgotten, get busted, remain unappreciated. If you keep living as though it won’t, you set yourself up for frustration and crankiness.

Make peace with the fact that on any new journey, any new initiative someone or something will screw up in ways you failed to anticipate. Figure that into your planning—or at least your mental preparations—so that when it does happen you’re not thrown by it. Or worse, you’re scared out of packing up and taking the family someplace next time.

Indeed, you’ll never know success unless you learn to understand mistakes as a necessary part of the information gathering process. If you want to succeed, you have to be prepared for failure. It’s the law.

Look, nobody wants to travel with a sullen Dad. Even sullen Dads don’t like it that much. Believe me, I know.

Five Fears That Make Change Difficult and the Ways to Address Them

By Derek Penwell

She placed one more faded greeting card into the brown box she’d bought in a package of boxes from the U-haul place. Afterward, she taped the box and left it sitting for the custodian to collect. It needed to go upstairs to the attic with the other faded greeting cards, old swatches of fabric, and stray skeins of yarn.

As long as she could remember—which, being eighty-five, turned out to be a long time—there’d been a women’s circle. For generations it had existed as the heartbeat of mission and outreach in her congregation, the most active group by far—organizing, fundraising, cooking, sewing, comforting, loving, ministering. But not long ago she’d said goodbye to her last “partner in crime” at a nice, if sparsely attended, funeral bathed in blue and pink lights and smelling of lilies. And now, bitter as it tasted, she was admitting defeat.

Scrawled in Sharpie on the top of the box it said, “cards.” But one word could never do justice to all that she’d packed up for storage.

She’d insisted on doing it herself. After all, she knew not only what the boxes contained, but also what they represented. And she couldn’t quite bear the thought of turning over stewardship of that legacy quite yet.

So, as she mopped her brow, she thought of the old offertory sentence from the Book of Common Prayer, bidding us all “with gladness” to “present the offerings and oblations of our life and labor to the Lord.” Looking up from the Sharpie-marked carton, she decided it was with gladness that she offered up the offerings and oblations of the life and labor of dozens of strong women to the Lord.

But she also had to admit that, beyond the odd ambivalence of claiming this heritage with one arthritic hand and passing it on with the other, there was something else. Deep down beneath the cobwebs and the doilies, beneath the gratitude and the disappointment lived something perhaps even more elemental.

Fear.

Let’s be honest. She’s afraid … afraid all that work will get lost in the hurly-burly, afraid of irrelevance, afraid, as the song says, of being forgotten and not yet gone.

She lives in the fear that the young people who’re running things now will forget not only the things those women did, but more importantly the reason they did them.

But she doesn’t quite know how to say so much, afraid that there isn’t enough packing tape in the world to hold back what would break forth if she really stopped to talk about it. So, she expresses her fear the best she can.

When asked what’s wrong, she says: “Nobody seems to care about __ anymore.” [Fill in the blank: tradition, outreach, old people, young families, pastoral care, the neighborhood, the throw pillows my mother made, the Christmas Bazaar … me.]

If you listen closely, you can hear the quaver in the voice that reveals a trembling heart. The fear is so broad and unspecific, it’s hard to pin down. But it’s there. The anger, the reticence, the stubbornness often are merely a mask to hide the fear:

1. I’m afraid that what we’ve done won’t be valued. I don’t want the things we cared so much about to be ridiculed, or worse, forgotten—as though what we valued isn’t worth anything. We worked so hard on these things. We planned and fretted and cried over this stuff. We spent hours polishing, mending, painting, storing, patching, and propping this stuff up. So, fine, maybe things don’t look so good anymore bathed in the harvest gold and avocado green of our memories. But a lot of the stuff we did worked. We just want someone to care that we cared. We know everything changes, and nothing lasts forever, but all we’re looking for is a little gentleness when it comes to the things we tried to pass on.
2. I’m afraid that the choice to do a new thing is only a sneaky way of criticizing what we did. It feels like if you change it, if you stop doing it, if you throw it away, you’re denigrating what we did. Like it was stupid to think what we thought and care about the stuff we cared about. Change, as much as we don’t want it to, too often feels like censure.
3. I’m afraid that the good we did will be undone through a lack of attention. If you young people don’t carry this on, we’re afraid that people will suffer. We really helped folks. It took a lot of time and energy to build the programs, organization, and physical structures we’re handing on to you. We’d like to know that you’ve at least tried to figure out how to make sure the people we helped continue to be helped, and that you’re not just walking away from an opportunity to make a difference in the world.
4. I’m secretly afraid we made some bad decisions that will cripple the congregation/denomination moving forward. We bought it and now it’s an albatross. We sold it and now we need it back. We planted it; it died, and now we can never plant there again. We loved it and now it’s killing us. We didn’t welcome them when we had the chance and now they won’t have anything to do with us anymore. 
5. I’m just afraid that I’m going to wake up one day, and I won’t recognize this place anymore. We had a hand in shaping this, but now our fingerprints all seem to have been wiped off. We had a dream of the future, but what we have now doesn’t look anything like what we envisioned when we were in charge of mapping out the future.

If you want to make change, you need to address the underlying fear. And telling someone not to be afraid, or that they’re silly for being afraid, or that they should just trust you more isn’t addressing the underlying fear; it’s a lazy way of telling yourself that you’ve done everything you can.

If you think there are tough changes ahead, here are a few tips getting as many people on board as possible:

• Celebrate the past. Rehearse the history. Raise up the successes. Seek to understand the failures. Let people know that what they did was indispensable to bringing everything to this point where exciting opportunities mark the future. Let them know you value their contributions.
• Offer reassurances that the people and institutions that have been helped in the past will continue to be helped as you move into the future. Or, if you’re going to go in a different direction leaving certain things behind, identify what needs were being met and values were driving the passion of the old system. Then reframe the new system of changes using those needs and values as touchstones for the new work you want to do. (So, you’re not going to continue knitting Walkman holders for the kids going to college anymore. Fine. But be sure to emphasize the fact that the new pub night with the college students is just a continued attempt to show support for young people heading into uncertain times of transition.)
• Root change in story. Congregations and denominations are always telling stories about who they are and where they come from as a means of self-understanding. As you seek to tell a new story of where you’re headed, make certain to set it in the established narrative. In other words, make clear that changes aren’t a disruption of the story that’s always been told, but the logical extension of that same story moving into a different world. (So, you’re discussing becoming an Open and Affirming congregation or denomination, offering welcome to all people, regardless of sexual orientation or gender expression. Fine. Name this as an issue of justice. Then tell the story about how you’ve always led on issues of justice—from civil rights, to support for undocumented workers, to equity for women, to your work for Habitat for Humanity or the soup kitchen or advocacy against payday lending. You get the point. Tell the story with change as part of the plot trajectory, and not as an attempt to set the old story aside in favor of a new one.)

Here’s the thing: It’s ok to box up old things and move on. But the kind of boxes you use, and the care with which you store them will make a big difference when you start unpacking the new stuff.

An Update on the Life of the Church

By Derek Penwell

As you may have noticed, a number of things have changed around Douglass Blvd. Christian Church over the past few years. I thought I'd take a moment to help you see the scope of these changes, and to offer you the thinking under which we're currently operating. It's all pretty exciting!

Organizational Philosophy

We no longer operate on the Functional Church Model of church organization—that is, an efficiency model of church organization popularized during the industrial revolution. The thinking in the early twentieth century was that businesses were enjoying some success by reorganizing themselves with a board of directors, an executive committee, and a host of standing committees. The Functional Church Model worked pretty well during the salad days of Mainline Protestantism's cultural ascendancy in the middle of the twentieth century. Unfortunately, as churches experienced membership decline beginning in the early 1970s, filling out the organizational flow chart became more and more difficult. [I've written extensively about this here and here and here.]

Moreover, with the increase in the number of families where both partners work, finding time to devote to committee work became increasingly difficult. At some point, young people seemed no longer to be stepping up to take over the often difficult work that had been performed by committees. Consequently, congregations began experience a great deal of stress, wondering how the work that had been getting done, would now be done.

At DBCC we've experienced these same stressors. Beginning in 2006, the congregation underwent the transition from the old Functional Church Model to a new form of organization, where the work is driven no longer by committees "thinking up stuff to do," and then having to figure out how to convince someone to do it, but by people who have a desire to see a particular ministry take shape. We still have a few ministries that cover things like worship, property, and personnel, but almost all of the ministry opportunities in the church have developed because someone saw a need, and asked the church for help in figuring out a way to meet it.

• Woodbourne House
• our move to become Open and Affirming
• Louisville Classical Academy
• the Douglass Loop Farmers Market
• Freedom House
• our public stance on marriage
• our ministry to refugees
• our work with the Fairness Campaign and Louisville Youth Group
• five mission trips to Mexico
• CLOUT
• our support of the Louisville Gay Men's Chorus
• Diersen House
• our support of GLAD
• the expansion of our web and social media presence
• the clothing closet

None of these ministry initiatives started in a Leadership meeting, or because of the work of a committee. They all came about as a result of people who saw a need, brought it forward, and then took responsibility for helping to make it happen.

Now, our Leadership Coordination Ministry isn't primarily responsible for thinking up new things to do; it is responsible for seeing that the church meets its obligations and for seeing that potential ministries have the resources they need to thrive. Consequently, we don't have to worry about expending energy on continuing things for which there is no longer any enthusiasm. We invest in ministry where the energy is.

Facilities Management

One of the most visible changes in the life of DBCC over the past few years revolves around the use of our campus. We've undergone a philosophical shift in our thinking about the resources over which God has made us responsible. For years there was anxiety about how the church was going to maintain a campus as large as the one we have with a congregation that, for a time, continued to see itself shrinking.

There were several serious discussions about how we should handle such an enormous responsibility, ranging at certain points all the way to whether or not we might be better off selling our building, and finding somewhere more manageable.

A philosophy began to evolve, however: What if we use our building and grounds as tools to be used for ministry, rather than as keepsakes to bequeath to future generations. Of course, we'd still want to care for them as good stewards. Only now, we could feel free to give them away to other groups when we could, and to charge rent for other space where we needed to.

As important as anything about this shift in philosophy is its implications as a theology of stewardship. We've tried to move from an "attractional model" of programming—in which we do programming with an eye to attracting people to membership at DBCC—to a purely ministry-driven model of programming—in which we offer space and programming as a gift, because it's the right thing to do. Of course, we hope people will like us and want to come find out about us, but that's not why we do what we do. We do what we do because we believe it's what God is calling us to do.

This theology of stewardship has allowed us to have our facilities used at almost total capacity every day. With Woodbourne House, we've helped offer low cost senior housing to eleven people. We give our grounds to the community on Saturdays for the Douglass Loop Farmers Market, allowing a neighborhood gathering place every week for people in our community. We donate space to Highland Community Ministries every weekday for a senior adult day center. On weeknights, we donate space to two AA groups, the Humane Society, HCM Water Color and Ball Room Dancing classes, the Louisville Gay Men's Chorus, and an LGBT Film Group.

We offset the costs of ministry by renting space to the HCM day care and to the Louisville Classical Academy. In addition, we rent 28 parking spaces every day to businesses in the Douglass Loop, and lease the front parking lot to the bank.

Our mixed-use formula has allowed us to stabilize our revenue over the foreseeable future, while at the same time giving us an opportunity to serve the community . . . just because.

Operations Management

The change in our organizational philosophy, the way we use our facilities, together with the increasing use of electronic communications is revolutionary enough that it has caused us to rethink the way much of the staff does its job. With the constant use of our facilities, we've had to employ a handy man, Neil, whose primary responsibility is to maintain and repair the building. Neil, in consultation with Gary King, is kept busy trying to look after a heavily used facility.

These changes have probably had more impact on Jennifer Vandiver than anyone else. Jennifer's responsibilities have increased significantly. She still answers the phone and produces the bulletin and newsletter. But now she spends a great deal of her time coordinating the use of the building between so many groups. Recognizing this shift in responsibility, Jennifer has been given a new job title by the Leadership Coordination Ministry: Operations Manager. Because we now must deal with the reality of space limitations, Jennifer is the point person when it comes to the many requests to use our facilities. Moreover, she acts as the "first responder" when a group has a difficulty or complaint.

Our Internet presence, which has grown considerably over the past five years, has become a major area of ministry to people all over the world. A majority of first time visitors when asked how they found us will say they saw our web site. Our sermon podcasts and blog articles are consumed by people all over the world. The realization that our ministry was broadening in this area caused the Leadership Coordination Ministry this year to fund a new position, charged with the responsibility of managing this new frontier for ministry. We're proud to welcome Geoff Wallace back to help us discover the exciting possibilities of ministry done on a global scale.

And of course, Joanna, Brenda, Clare, Ben, and I are also finding new ways to engage in ministry that allows us to equip followers of Jesus for the unfolding reign of God.

As we move forward together, please help us keep our eyes open for new possibilities for ministry at DBCC. The coming years look just as exciting!

Femto Photography and Seeing Around Corners: Why Following Jesus Is about Risk

By Derek Penwell

In July, 2012 a scientist from MIT, Ramesh Raskar, gave a Ted Talk on an amazing new innovation in photography. Femto photography films at one trillion frames per second. What this allows scientists to do, for example, is make a time lapse video of the movement of light (which is pretty dang cool on its own merits!). You can watch a burst of light projected from a laser as it shoots through a Coke bottle!

[Note: I realize that’s two exclamation points in two consecutive sentences—a grammatical practice upon which I generally frown, except to say things like “Happy birthday!” or “Congratulations on your Bassett Hound’s successful completion of agility training!”—but this stuff is pretty phenomenal! Oops. Sorry.]

The practical applications of this new technology are even more astounding. For one thing, when a burst of light is shot from a laser, it diffuses when the photons strike an object. Various photons are then reflected back to the source. Using heavy computational power, the scientists are able to stitch together the individual photon speeds to produce a 3-D model of the thing that the light hits.

The ability to produce 3-D models of things struck by a burst of light gets really interesting, however, when you realize that the reflection of light doesn’t have to come from an object in a straight line with the laser. Meaning … you can project the light around obstacles, and the computer will take into account the extra angles of reflection, and still construct an accurate 3-D image.

In other words, it allows you literally to see around the corner—to construct a 3-D image of something you can’t even see! [Again, sorry.] It’s almost like seeing into the future—getting an accurate vision of something before you ever get there.

I like the sound of that idea. It’s not flying or retractable adamantium claws, but it’s still kind of like a super power.

I understand the attraction of seeing around the corner; it’s a great metaphor for predicting the future, of telling you whether a thing will be worth doing.

But here’s the thing: In real life the only way you’ll know if a thing is worth doing is after you’ve already done it, when you look back on it—which is to say, after the toothpaste is already out of the tube.

“Should we let our daughter go on that trip to Europe?”

“Should I pay the electric bill so we don’t freeze, or should I fill my blood pressure medication so I don’t have a stroke?”

“Should I take the new job with exciting potential, or stay in the job where I’m most comfortable?”

“Should I tell my parents and friends I’m gay—risking their love and support, or should I keep it to my myself—risking my sanity?”

How do you know until after you do it?

That’s life. We have to make all sorts of calculations about what to do without enough information about what it will look like when it’s finished, or whether having done it will prove advantageous or harmful.

How do you know until after you do it.

That’s also what life following Jesus looks like. Seeing around the corner would certainly make church planning more effective, for instance. It’d be nice to know whether something is going to work before you had to take a chance on it. Face-saving is what it is.

If you don’t know what you’re getting into when you plan something, you risk failing. And failing is unacceptable to many churches.

Congregations in decline almost always understand church planning to be a matter not of achieving success, but of avoiding failure. Consequently, they tend to stand before decisions trying to do the advanced calculations necessary to see what lies around the corner, refusing to act boldly for fear that something might not work.

“Should we do this?”

“I don’t know.”

“Because if we do, it might not work. We’d be out all that money, plus things like this tend to make Janice mad.”

Flourishing congregations, on the other hand, weigh a decision against past experience, then make a decision. They’ve gotten comfortable with the fact that they will never have everything nailed down before taking the leap. They’ve made peace with the knowledge that everything they try has a pretty good chance of washing out. But they’ve learned to accept the prospect of failure as the cost of doing business.

Flourishing congregations realize that there’s no way to ensure something will work on the front end. They understand that they’ll never know if an idea was a good one until they look back on it, assessing it in the rearview mirror. But the inability to look around the corner to see what’s coming doesn’t prevent them from turning corners they think faithfulness calls them to take. They understand that a life spent following Jesus is an adventure, not a tour.

Before we get there, we’d like to know that where we’re going is where we want to be.

Maybe one day there will be an ecclesiastical version of Femto photography that will make discipleship a surer thing. On the other hand, if discipleship is an adventure, whatever such an innovation might produce, it won’t have much to do with following Jesus.

What I Learned about Leadership from Being Stuck in an Airport

By Derek Penwell

As I sit in the Dallas airport, 25 hours into my version of the airport story from hell, I cannot help but think about the way something as simple as a flat tire on an airplane can put a serious kink a person’s faith. Apparently—and I did not know this—the FAA doesn’t consider Fix-a-Flat a suitable repair for a damaged airplane tire … at least that’s what the kind woman at the American Airlines gate told me when I walked up after seven hours to make suggestions about how we might possibly, “if-it’s-all-the-same-to-you,” move this along.

I’m going with a group to Mexico to do work on water purification, which is neither here nor there, except to draw attention to the competing impulses of a group that both urgently wants to get down to Mexico to do what we’ve been planning to do, while still remaining committed to the prospect of sidestepping the temptation to act like turds. They’re actually doing great, but nobody could blame them if they did spike the sphygmomanometer.

The thing about being stuck in airport is that not only is it exhausting staring at the same patterns in the industrial carpet for hours on end, but the uncertainty can tax even the strongest spiritual constitution. What lies ahead is uncertain, with just enough hope to keep you from wandering away from the gate and down to the bar to lay in liquid stores for the duration. And so you sit—miserable to be where you are, but with not information to provide you with the incentive to go somewhere else.

Which misery sounds like a lot of congregations I know. Life in declining congregations often mirrors the nightmare of being stuck in an airport. They don’t know what the future holds, and nobody can give them enough information to act on, so they sit on their hands, vacillating between the anger that nobody knows anything and the fear that whatever it is that nobody knows will materialize without warning and cause the whole journey to veer off into the ditch.

But the other thing I learned about being stuck in an airport is that good leadership can be the difference between communal thriving in a less than optimal situation and a spiraling descent into a band of mutant circus geeks on the prowl in search of the heads of airline personnel.

Here’s what I learned about leadership in a declining congregation from being stuck in an airport for 26 (now) hours:

1. Being calm is contagious. If the person in charge is wound too tight, everyone gets anxious. Tranquility sells.
2. Anxiety over things you can’t change isn’t merely a waste of time; it also robs you of the joy of the adventure. You can expend a great deal of energy worrying about things you have no control over, which leads to anxiety (see above). Anxiety causes the mind to race, limiting options and impeding creativity. But just as importantly, it blinds you to the fact that adventures are adventures precisely because of the challenges … not despite them.
3. Being a jerk to people who can’t do anything about the situation doesn’t change anything but the atmosphere. Not only does being an overbearing fussbudget fail as a strategy for making things better, it also helps to create overbearing fussbudgets of others (see above). Remember: You have to live in the climate you create.
4. Laughing makes everything a little less crappy, and can help bind a community together. In addition to the fact that laughter helps to relieve the tension of a difficult journey (see above), it also helps to draw people together. Any adventure is not only better with companions, it also makes survival that much more likely … just ask Frodo Baggins, or Harry Potter, or Jesus—although survival in Jesus’ case apparently required stretching out on a stone slab for a couple of days—which is sort of like airport furniture, if you think about it.

Being a part of a congregation in decline (or stuck in an airport) isn’t, generally speaking, high up on anybody’s list of things to do before they die. But if you stick around long enough, chances are pretty good you’re going to find yourself staring adventure in the face. You might just as well do it with a little grace and style.

Your band of traveling companions will thank you.

“Tell me what you want to do, not what you want to avoid doing.

By Derek Penwell

“What do you want to do when you get out of college?” That was the question on the table. Summer camp. We were gathered together with one of the grizzled veteran counselors to talk about what we planned to do with our lives.

Having just graduated high school, we found the whole conversation a bit abstract. We didn’t know. And we certainly didn’t want to be reminded about the fact that we didn’t know.

But somebody asked the question, and we were all raised with the kind of manners that wouldn’t allow us to say what we were thinking: “I really don’t want to think about this. Ask me about the beach, or about what we’re going to do when we get to college. After college is just too far away.”

One girl said, “Well, I don’t want to have to do a job I hate, where I’m stuck doing the same thing over and over—like a factory. And I don’t want to work someplace that makes me do busy work just to satisfy some kind of Human Resources directive intended to create a ‘positive working environment.’”

“Ok. What kind of working environment do you want to work in?”

“I don’t want work with a lot of passive-aggressive people—you know, the kind who get mad about little things and start putting up signs about not eating their yogurt or taking the stapler off their desk.”

“You run into a lot of sign hangers, a lot of yogurt and stapler thieves in high school, did you?”

“No, but I hear my dad talk about it all the time.”

“Anyone else?”

A long-haired guy in a denim jacket and boots said, “I don’t want to have do any job that requires me to wear a name tag or be a part of a ‘team’” (his use of air quotes tipping us off to his studied use of sarcasm.)

I jumped in and said, “Look, I just don’t want to have to get up too early in the morning.” I was not particularly ambitious.

The counselor, showing signs of frustration, said, “You’ve obviously thought about this. Here’s what I want, though. Tell me what you want to do, not what you want to avoid doing. What are your dreams? What makes you excited enough to get out of bed in the morning? What do you care about so much you’d be willing to die for?”

The impression many young adults who’ve lost any desire to associate themselves with the church feel like they’ve heard ad nauseum an answer to the questions, “What do Christians want to avoid? What do Christians hate? What kinds of things are Christians willing to kill for?”

As cliché as it may sound, more people in emerging generations know Christianity by what it stands against than by what it stands for. Jesus, though he clearly had strong opinions about what people should stay away from, seemed on balance more concerned about the kind of things in which people should be investing their lives.

This full-throated commitment to doing something got Jesus in trouble. In Matthew, he is contrasted with the ascetic John the Baptist: “For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon’; the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax-collectors and sinners!’”

It’s important to point out that Jesus drew the contrast between himself and John the Baptist to indicate that there’s just no pleasing some people, no matter what you do. However, it is worth noting that Jesus developed a reputation not for the things he avoided, but for the things he threw himself into.

In a post-denominational world the church must be aware of the widely held perception that it cares more about keeping people from doing things than in giving them the resources they need to live and flourish, and, finally, to follow Jesus. As commitment to mainline denominations deteriorates, the church would do well to think more intentionally about how it embodies its vision of the reign of God.

Justice. Equity. Mutuality. Community. Compassion for the poor, the outcast, the powerless. These are positive visions.

“But isn’t that just a rehash of the traditional liberalism mainline denominations have been trying to interest people in since the latter part of the nineteenth century? If it were such a winning strategy, why are mainline denominations dying?”

Excellent point! I realize I’m trying to thread a pretty fine needle here. What I’m suggesting, though, isn’t a strategy (I don’t think traditional liberal mainliners necessarily thought the Social Gospel was just a strategy either). Making strategic decisions about justice in God’s reign as a way to attract more people misses the whole point. Justice, equity, mutuality, etc. are what we think Jesus came to establish, not well-devised membership recruitment tools.

In a post-denominational world the church needs to quit thinking first about how to save its own bacon, and start devoting more thought to doing the right thing—because we have no other way of conceiving our lives as followers of Jesus.

Paracosm: Playing in a New World with a Different Set of Rules

By Derek Penwell

When I teach Theodicy (i.e., the problem of evil and suffering) to my university students, I start out by playing a game of hangman. I draw out a random number of blanks, and start asking for letters.

“S? No.”

“R? Nope.”

“E? Sorry.”

I doesn’t take long before I have a couple of blanks filled with X or Q. I might randomly add another space or two. This usually brings cries of protest.

Finally, the figure fills out. They lose.

Now they’re really howling. “There isn’t any set of English words with those letters!”

“Do you want to know what the phrase is?” So, I start writing on the board: Lawlessness and Chaos.

Sheer frustration. Somebody, usually earnest and sitting in the front row, someone used to school making sense, yells out, “That’s not fair.”

So, I ask, “How do you like it when somebody doesn’t follow the rules? Hard to play the game when someone keeps changing them, isn’t it?”

They don’t like it … not one bit.

But then again, nobody does, do they? We like consistency and predictability. We don’t like the thought that lawlessness and chaos might insinuate themselves into the otherwise stable taken-for-grantedness of our lives.

One of the reasons, people have such a difficult time with the question of evil and suffering is that it usually represents a deviation from the way our middle class American lives are lived.

You turn on your T.V. set one Friday morning, getting ready for Christmas, planning your last-minute shopping, when a reporter announces that some guy has walked into an elementary school in Connecticut and mercilessly slaughtered twenty six year-olds. Shock. Anguish. Outrage.

But people die all the time, right? Even children. What’s so different about this?

The difference is that we don’t want to live in a world where it’s possible for grade school kids to be murdered in the sanctuaries we’ve built for their education. Too scary to contemplate.

So, what do we do? We start looking for someone or something to blame.

Inadequate security. Proliferation of weapons. Poor mental health care. Violent video games.

We’ve got to find some culprit, since the thought that sometimes awful things happen and that, no matter how well we prepare, we can’t prevent those awful things is just too horrifying to ponder. So, we look to see where the rules have been broken.

The problem of evil raises the issue of anomie (lawlessness). We feel as if no one is in charge, as if there are no rules, and therefore, no meaning. Even the way we phrase it (“the problem of evil”) implicitly suggests our belief that something has gone wrong—that something isn’t as it should be. It suggests that evil is somehow unnatural, a breakdown in the system.

But, even more than evil, the real culprit is anomie. Even if the outcome doesn’t amount to evil and suffering, human beings generally don’t like surprises. We like predictability. The idea of change is enough to set our teeth on edge. If I put the toe-nail clippers in the medicine cabinet, I want to know that the next time I need them, they’ll be right where I go to look.

“Well, did you look in the cupboard?”

“No. Why would I look there? I put them in the medicine cabinet.”

“You’ve got to broaden your field of vision. You can’t just look in one place and expect to find something.”

“I can expect to find something where I put it, because that’s why I go to the trouble of putting it there in the first place—so, I don’t have to have a conversation with a fifteen year-old at 7:45 in the morning about where my dang toe-nail clippers are!”

Stable. Predictable. Is that too much to ask?

Unfortunately, stable and predictable are much harder to find than we realize. The world is changing … rapidly. Things are growing more complex, less predictable all the time. It’s scary.

And communities are just as likely as individuals to look for stasis in a world undergoing constant transformation. In fact, for a lot of reasons, communities are often less open to change, more resistant to playing by a different set of rules than individuals.

I’m thinking specifically of churches—both congregationally and denominationally.

Seth Godin wrote an interesting blog post the other day about paracosms. Paracosms are highly detailed and absorbing imaginary worlds—think Middle Earth or Narnia. One of the notable differences with paracosms is that they operate under a different set of rules from the ones we live under.  Talking animals.  Dragons.  Magic.  Invisibility.  

These paracosms are useful to child developmental psychologists in helping them to understand how children confront the anomie represented by a death or tragedy experienced in early childhood. Paracosms help people sort out and understand their loss.1

Paracosms, elaborate and detailed worlds that allow for a rearranging of constituent parts into new possibilities, are particularly helpful in allowing children to orient “themselves in reality.”

With Seth Godin, I find the idea of paracosms to be an interesting notion for creatively attacking the uncertainty of a changing world. The church, which has undergone its own share of tragedy and loss over the past forty years, might do well to begin to play with paracosms.

• What would a perfect world look like?

• How would the church contribute to the shaping of such a world?

• If all the old rules about what church should look like were no longer in place (e.g., buildings, Sunday mornings at 11:00, denominational headquarters, Sunday School, parking lots, copy machines, bulk mailing permits, etc.), how might congregations and their denominational counterparts on the regional and national levels embody the reign of God in ways designed to inhabit a new world?

Let’s get really crazy:

• Would ordained clergy still look the same? Would we even have clergy? 

• How about the laity?  What if the laity were the radical ones pushing to respond to the demands of the new world?

• Would this paracosm require that the bulk of the people who spoke for God be male, middle class, and white?

• What if this new world were so upside down that because of the population make up, middle class white guys were the last ones seated at the trough instead of the first ones?

• What if worship were conceived as something we did on our feet, searching out people where they live—and not on our butts, waiting for people to come to where we live?

• What if this new world required that we have no assets at all?  How would the church live out its witness?

I know, all that stuff is fantastical. You start screwing around with the rules and the hoi polloi get reeeeeally anxious. Anomie. Lawlessness. Chaos.

“You can’t have a church without all that stuff!”

Why not? Maybe the future that’s unfolding, this new world, requires a whole different set of rules that render the old assumptions about what’s necessary obsolete?

Seth Godin writes:

The most effective, powerful way to envision the future is to envision it, all of it, including a future that doesn’t include your sacred cows. Only then can you try it on for size, imagine what the forces at work might be and then work to either prevent (or even better, improve on) that future and your role in it.

We’re followers of Jesus, given the responsibility of proclaiming a new world—one in which God reigns, and not the powers and principalities of this present age.

Change ought not to frighten us; that’s what we’re here to announce … for Christ’s sake.

1. Morrison, Delmont C. and Shirley L., Memories of Loss and Dreams of Perfection: Unsuccessful Childhood Grieving and Adult Creativity. Baywood, 2005. ↩

Sermon Podcast: There's No Place Like Home

We thought the safest place to be . . . would be . . . to be . . . where we’d been . . . where we used to be.

We thought if we could just recapture what was here before, we’d be able to handle what was happening now.

The message of Jeremiah, however, is that the safest place to be is the place where God has placed us—which is to say, where God has made a place for us.

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Pacific Northwest UMC News Blog – The Church Needs More Innovative Pastors like MTV Needs More Twerking

If we are to move forward, what the church really needs are innovative lay people; willing to adopt, suggest, and try new things. When a lay person puts forth a new idea and builds their group of advocates (early adopters), their innovation, particularly if it challenges the church culture, will still hit Moore’s chasm. The difference however is that now the pastor is free to insert their authority and influence to help good ideas to bridge this gap. And when they do so, they also create goodwill and affirm the gifts of their laity to boot.

Our churches need, desperately, to become places of change. While the occasional new idea from the pastor can be good modeling, the pastor that innovates continuously sucks the air out of the church and leaves no room for innovation elsewhere. Our churches would be better served by clergy who excelled at creating and nurturing cultures of innovation.

I would expect that some might say that this sentiment is nice but they know, or serve, churches where creating a culture of innovation is impossible. Where we find this to be true we should be quick to lock the doors and shutter the windows. Before we do this however, we should consider that there is a difference between a church that continuously rejects its pastor’s new ideas and one that refuses to create their own when given a chance.

It's All About Getting There

By Derek Penwell

Shipping

Shipping. In the end it’s all about shipping.

It’s not about starting. Anyone can start.

It’s about producing. It’s about seeing a project through to completion. It’s about shipping.

Used to be, I was a good starter. I liked the process. I’d get excited about something, and I’d go out and buy a notebook to start taking notes, start planning, start getting ready to start.

And pens. I bought a lot of pens.

And calendars. Notebooks, and pens, and calendars.

How could I not be serious with all these office supplies?

Or, after I got into the computer age, it was software. If I only had the right software, I’d already be finished.

The problem was I mistook starting for shipping. I thought that if I could just get started, I would have done the really important work. If I could just line up the perfect office supplies, the right software, I would have solved the hardest part.

I mistook preparing to work for work.

And it’s not that preparing for work is unimportant. You need the right tools to do the job. Unfortunately, I spent so much time getting the right tools, then organizing them, and making sure the desk or the paints or the tool bench was just so, that I could walk away from the work thinking I’d accomplished work without ever actually working.

Perhaps, even more importantly, I usually had tools enough to start anyway. I convinced myself that the work couldn’t get done, however, without “better” tools.

Here’s what it took me so long to figure out—and occasionally still need help figuring out—good work is the application of resources in the service of realizing a goal—that is, good work is about completing a project and shipping it. Good work doesn’t require a perfect beginning. Perfect beginnings are a white whale that lead you to the middle of nowhere.

Good rule of thumb: If the work you’re doing isn’t bringing you closer to achieving your objective, it’s wasting your time. Not only is it not helping you do good work, it’s preventing you from doing good work—since all the fiddling around deceives you into thinking you’re actually doing something, when in fact, you’re actively, not doing the very thing that would help you achieve your goal.

Sometimes you just have to use the notebook you have.

Maybe you have to make peace with the fact that the old Bic you find at the bottom of the drawer will work just fine.

Perhaps what you need isn’t new software, but a bare-bones text editor and the determination to start driving the cursor across the page—before you have all the details worked out.

The Church and Getting Sidetracked

One of the problems with following Jesus is that you never know quite where he’s going to go. According to the Gospels, the disciples regularly found this little idiosyncrasy of Jesus vexing.

First, he’s going here. Then, he’s going there. The disciples found it next to impossible to keep up with him.

Then, after Jesus left, they stood around, waiting for someone to tell them what to do next.

After the ascension, they stood around looking into the heavens, wondering, “Now what?” Suddenly, two men in white robes sidle up and say, “Why are you just standing there? Quit mouth-breathing and get back to work.”

At Pentecost, they were all gathered together in the Azalea Room at the local Holiday Inn Express, wringing their hands, unable to work out just where to go next. The Holy Spirit showed up, kicked them out into the street with no discernible plan, “For crying out loud! Will you just get out there and start working?”

“We don’t know what to do.”

“Of course you don’t. And you’re never going to know sitting here, rearranging office supplies. You’re going to have to get out there and start.”

“We don’t know where to go.”

“If you wait to start walking until it’s all lined up for you, you’ll never find out where you need to go.”

“But what if we go in the wrong direction? What if we do the wrong thing?”

“You will. Inevitably. You’re going to make so many mistakes, even Lindsay Lohan’s going to look thoughtful next to you. But so what? Most likely, you won’t know exactly what to do and where to go until you’re already out there in the middle of it. So, go ahead and make some mistakes; because making mistakes in the service of a goal is preferable to sitting about endlessly rehearsing the reasons to continue sitting about.”

Congregations too often gets sidetracked. Worried about making mistakes, congregations freeze up.

Well, that’s not true entirely. It’s not like congregations that are afraid of making mistakes don’t do anything. They start things; they just don’t ship much that’s interesting. Unfortunately, the things they start are things with which they feel comfortable.

They spend a great deal of time lining up budgets, making flow charts, buying fancy stationary, dreaming up new programs. And these things feel like good work, like ministry.

But so often these scared congregations stop just short of doing good work because they fear making a mistake. Not wanting to do something that might raise the ire of the faithful, they stick to things they know—which would be one thing, if what they know actually took them toward anywhere interesting. As it is, much of the normal flurry of activity fails to help them arrive at a destination, amounting to energy expended in the service of wheel-spinning.

Here’s What I Think

1. Use the tools you’ve got … until you have enough experience to know they’re not sufficient. Then, go get what you need. (Consistently reversing the order here, will almost certainly guarantee you won’t ship.)
2. Start working. Start heading toward a destination.
3. If you don’t have all the details figured out about your goal, start working anyway. You’re more likely to understand exactly what you’re trying to do only after you’ve begun.
4. If you don’t have the exact GPS coordinates in hand, start heading in the general direction. (This isn’t the same as traveling at random. Start heading north, if north is where you think you need to be.)
5. Make some mistakes. Embrace your mistakes. They provide you valuable information.
6. If you’re on a journey to a destination, backtracking is not defeat; it’s re-calibration. (If you have an idea where you’re going, backtracking is almost always better than sidetracking.)
7. If you’re vaguely afraid of going someplace, it might be that you need to pay more attention to that place. It could truly be dangerous. Or it could be that it’s the very place you should be headed, since all truly interesting places involve a certain amount of risk.
8. Start. Produce. Finish. Ship. Repeat.