by Eddie Pipkin

Have you ever planned an event that went completely off the rails?  Of course you have.  We all have.  For those of us who started out in youth ministry, we have a whole shelf full of stories of plans that went dramatically awry.  We tell them in excruciating detail whenever we reunite with the survivors.  They are some of our most entertaining tales, and they are often told with an increasingly dramatic flair every time they are shared.  I was reminded of some of my own ministry-based brushes with infamy when I came across an account of the legendary 1958 Tampa Snow Show.  You think you’ve hosted disasters?  Read on.

The Snow Show was a crazy idea concocted by Florida marketers who wanted to bring the magic of Northern Christmas memories to the tropical setting of Tampa Bay.  Local promoters conceived a transplanted winter wonderland that would include thousands of pounds of “snow” composed of crushed ice, as well as a ski jumping hill, an ice-skating extravaganza, Santas, and an enormous Christmas tree.

Hundreds of thousands of people attended, but disaster ensued – it was a story so unabashedly chaotic, in fact, that it propelled the reputation of Weird Florida and the continuing mythology of “Florida Man.”

Eighty-degree temperatures melted the ice, although not before kids were knocking each other out with solidly frozen snowballs.  The champion ski-jumper proceeded down the thawed ski ramp anyway, crashing horrendously.  One of the skating performers inadvertently slashed a spectator with a skate.  Santa stole from the sponsoring department store.  The giant Christmas tree weighed so much that it sank into the soft ground and punctured a sewer line: bubbling sewage completed the bizarre holiday scene.

Lawsuits ensued.  It’s an incident so famous that the Tampa Bay History Center is currently sponsoring a related exhibit.  You can read more about it HERE.

Imagine a museum exhibit dedicated to our most prominent ministry failures and fiascoes!  (Honestly that would be a pretty good museum, wouldn’t it, as long as it focused on the comic lapses and spared us from remembering the more tragic miscalculations?)

I’ve had my share of epic blunders:

  • A youth trip that devolved into a highway food fight between vehicles that resulted in the Sheriff’s Department placing a call to the church office.
  • An overnight campout in which two of the adult leaders decided they were going to jump out of the woods to scare the group, which was doing a night hike, and the two “leaders” got lost in the state park wilderness for six hours.
  • A foam event for fourth and fifth graders – our own Florida attempt to mimic the magic of winter – in which the foam making device was so epically successful that the kids launched themselves into a playground covered six feet deep in foam, and only then did we realize they would be completely obscured by the stuff and we would have no idea where any of them were.
  • The time we did turkey bowling with frozen turkeys and ended up denting the side of the church building.
  • A 15-foot tall trebuchet (that’s a counterweight-powered catapult for the uninitiated) that we used to launch pumpkins. . . .  I’ll just let you imagine how that adventure ended.

I realized typing this that I probably have a small and very funny book’s worth of such stories.  No one was injured and no permanent damage was done, so I can tell them with a big smile and a long list of lessons learned.

At other times, things have gone wrong that are not so pleasant to look back on.  Mistakes were made that did end up hurting people, not physically, but emotionally and sometimes spiritually.  They were the kind of mistakes that, looking back, we are astonished at ourselves that we missed such obvious clues that things were not going to end well.  Sometimes all the signs were there, but we were just hard-headed and determined to proceed despite the obvious indications.

I am of two schools of thought when it comes to such preventable disasters.  On the one hand, there are tried and true ways of avoiding them.  On the other hand, kept within control, some chaos is a sure sign of entrepreneurial energy and healthy experimentation.  A little bedlam can be a sign of life.

The key, of course, is to unleash occasional ‘manageable chaos,’ the kind that leaves everybody laughing and shaking their heads but does no permanent damage and to avoid the kind of destructive chaos that can harm individuals, relationships, and organizational reputations.

We must surround our decision making with guardrails:

  • The more potentially chaotic an event or activity will be, the more precise our planning should be.
  • We must always ask ourselves what the worst-case scenario could be – how things might spin out of control.  And we must be honest in this assessment, not sugar-coating the possibilities.
  • We should always have a person in the planning group who can be the “adult in the room,” the person who will call us out when we are stepping over the line.  This works best when that person is well-loved and good-natured and can check our craziest impulses while also making us smile at our own absurdity.  (Shout-out to my old friend, Kent, who was part of one of the most creative worship planning teams with which I ever served.  We’d get spun up on some outlandish idea, the vision taking on a wild and unruly energy, and he was the best at giving us some deadpan feedback that brought us back to Earth.  You need a person like that.)

Being true to these processes can protect us from self-sabotage or the kind of blindness when the glare of our exuberant ideas distracts us from the obvious flaws.

On the other hand, we should commit to some unlikely and out of the ordinary approaches if we are to dream big and create memorable moments.

A friend and I were discussing smartphone apps the other day, and he made the comment that Android phones seemed to have more inventive and off-the-wall options.  I said that it was my understanding that this is because anybody can have access to the Android programming universe to experiment and unleash new concepts.  The Apple Store folks keep a much tighter lid on app creation and testing.  They want to be sure a product is refined and polished before risking their reputation with the public.  The Android approach is much messier and more accessible, therefore open to wilder, faster invention (that may or may not also be glitchy as a result).

Churches can work that way, too.  Some local churches have tightly controlling leadership that makes people jump through one hundred hoops before an idea or project can move forward.  Some local churches have leadership that is more entrepreneurial in spirit: let’s let the Spirit lead people to try a bunch of different things and see what works and what doesn’t.

Both approaches are valid.  Each has pros and cons.

One results in safe and carefully managed environments.  One results in creative chaos.  It’s up to us to decide what balance of those two options is right for our congregational context.  It’s an interesting thought exercise to consider Jesus’ ministry through this lens.  Next time you are holding a staff meeting or leadership gathering, take a few moments to debate the point and to share stories of your own ministry debacles, lessons learned, and your own strategies of chaos management.