Bench Theology

by Eddie Pipkin

If you stayed up late to watch game three of this year’s World Series between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Toronto Blue Jays, you were in for a doozy. The contest tied a record by going for seven hours and lasting 18 innings. That’s the equivalent of two full games. Maybe you don’t like baseball at all, even playoff baseball, so you are shrugging your shoulders right now and preparing to hit “next” on your inbox, but what I want to talk about is the spectacle of the two best teams using every single available player to try and win one super-long game. Baseball is designed to “go to the bench” to maximize the possibility of success. How much local churches could learn by doing the same!

Here are the stats: the Blue Jays used eight relief pitchers, and the Dodgers used nine! That means the Dodgers used every available pitcher they had. Meanwhile, the Blue Jays used not only every one of their available pitchers, but also every single position player that they had available! This was historical, unprecedented. Also, this is the way baseball is designed to be played.

You see, in football you may have a few specialists that you substitute in on specific plays, like a big, beefy running back who rams the ball through on short yardage downs, but, in general, players on the bench are back-ups. They only come in to replace somebody who is a first-string player. In baseball, players are routinely called forth from the bench to fulfill strategic roles. In football, you hope you don’t have to go to the bench. In baseball, going to the bench is always part of the core strategy.

Local churches should practice less football bench thinking and more baseball bench thinking.

We should be adjusting our regular lineups to spread the load.
We should be adjusting our regular lineups to strategically align talent with challenges.
We should be adjusting our regular lineups to give people a rest, not only when they are exhausted and burned out and can’t go another step, but as a healthy, holistic, preventative practice.

When we have ministry leadership in place, especially key leaders, we lean heavily on them, and they are often reluctant to share the load. But imagine if we strategically offloaded some of their work to others who have special skills, limited availability, or are in the pipeline to become key leaders later themselves. We give the “bench riders” valuable experience in partnership with the key leaders and thereby simultaneously ease the burden on those key leaders.

Baseball even calls pitchers who come in to take over “relievers”! They finish the game right at the crucial juncture in which the “starters” are fatigued and fading. Imagine ministry teams in which the people who are talented at visioning and planning hand off a project to people whose talents lie in detail management and stress-inducing final execution. What a dream team! (Sometimes we have really talented and experienced people we’d like to recruit for a project who say, “Look, I’d love to help, but I only have limited availability,” so we turn them down. What if, instead, we took them up on their limited offer and deployed them for a specific, time-boxed task.)

Also, in baseball, not only are the responsibilities distributed in ways that lead to victory, but the entire team, every player from the starting rotation to the back of the bench, has access to the team’s entire support system: coaches, nutritionists, doctors, and trainers. In the ministry space, too often the best support is hoarded by the key leadership, and those further down in the leadership flow chart don’t get the same access to training and resources. If we invested fully in current leadership and future leadership, transitions would be smoother and there would be no painful gaps when one person needs to fill in for another on a temporary or emergency basis.

Too often local churches are left in a mad scramble when a leader must withdraw. Who will take over? How far behind the curve will they be when they do? Integrated, team-based leadership that keeps everyone in the loop with real, shared responsibilities means that it’s a straightforward process to plug in the next hero who has to step in and get the job done.

Here’s one more thing about baseball. It has a highly developed system for bringing less experienced players up to speed: the minor leagues. Aspiring pitchers, catchers, fielders, and hitters can get valuable experience and learn the intricacies of the game, and when they show sufficient progress, they get invited for their chance at “the show,” the big leagues and all their glory. Local church leadership would be well to have a system whereby people who show signs of leadership and an interest in leading should be given training and a chance to lead in small things, so that they can move up to opportunities to lead bigger things. In the small-things phase, they should be given clear supervision and enthusiastic support, and bit by bit, they can take on more and more responsibility. We should always, always, always be cultivating the next generation of leaders.

Do you and your ministry teams practice baseball theology? Do you consciously develop a deep bench, filled with people who are ready to do their part? Do you hand out specialized projects based on specific talents, and do you carve big projects up into digestible parts, spreading the leadership effectively and lessening the load? Do you train everybody equally and with high quality? Does the coach know the backgrounds and skill sets of all the players?

Share your observations and objections in the comments section below. And if you have time, check out a little baseball before it’s too late.