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.

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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.  ↩

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.