by Eddie Pipkin

Image by Anja from Pixabay

It’s plenty easy to cruise along with something that’s “good enough.”  Right now, I have a busted stereo in my 2002 Jeep, so I keep telling myself how awesome it is to ride along without the distraction of music or news, just my own thoughts to keep me company.  Surely, it’s not that I’m just too lazy to deal with changing out the sound system or too cheap to pay a professional to do it!  We make those kinds of compromises all the time: keeping the thing that kinda sorta still works to delay dealing with the perceived hassle of fixing things correctly, but in making that choice we deprive ourselves (and often others) of the many, many ways that life could be better.

I am certainly guilty of this “not broke enough to fix it” mentality, but I am pretty sure I’m not alone, and it’s an all-too-common malady among local churches.  We tolerate systems that don’t really work the way they are supposed to, facilities that don’t really meet our needs, and people who aren’t quite right for the jobs to which they are assigned.

What is it the magic moment that gets us over the hump and provokes us to deal with these nagging non-performances?  What is the straw that breaks the camel’s back?  It’s different for every scenario – I have a habit of sitting in those plastic Adirondack chairs out in the yard, despite the warning of a crack or three in them, until they shatter and dump me on the ground – with me it usually takes something drastic.  We can do a lot of preventable damage along the way if we function by the don’t-fix-it-until-it’s-catastrophically-broken model.

I kept coming back to versions of this topic in my Internet reading this week, so I thought it would be fun to link you to some other sources who, frankly, are better bloggers than I am.

Clearly nailing this topic was blogger Adam Soccolich over at Jason Feifer’s One Thing Better blog.  He wrote this past week about his favorite old beard trimmer and how his dedication to it over long years had gradually morphed into an unpleasant, hair-tugging, beard trimming torture session.  He loved that trimmer, but its useful time was done and getting a new one returned him to manscaping nirvana.

We get so used to the things we love (or conversely, we love the things we get so used to), that we fail to see how they are failing us.  Of course, other people can see it, unencumbered as they are by our nostalgic perspective.  That’s why it’s good to keep some outside accountability partners.  Soccolich’s wife opened his eyes and saved his beard hairs in this case.

Here’s a link to the whole blog, “How to Fix the Thing That’s Secretly Slowing You Down.”  Here is a quote that sets up the problem:

When something breaks, we know it. And hopefully fix it.

But what happens when something only sorta breaks — like when a system, process, relationship, or job still functions, even though it’s become partially terrible.

The answer: We keep it. Then we make excuses for it, even as it slows us down, frustrates us, costs us money, or drains our energy. We say: Yeah, but it’s not bad all the time…

But let me tell you something: There is nothing more dangerous than a thing that sorta still works.

That’s the problem!  At the local church level, let’s say we have a Hospitality Team, and they show up on Sunday mornings, more or less, and they perfunctorily greet people, and they collect the offering, but they do all these things with a lackluster attitude, and they do the bare minimum.  Or maybe we have a person running our children’s ministry who is of average competence but also average enthusiasm, who provides things for the kids to do every week but rarely anything that anybody is getting excited about.  In each case, the people involved aren’t exactly doing anything wrong, but it’s hard to measure the missed opportunities of things that aren’t really done right!

It’s hard to bring change to those scenarios, and we tend to avoid the difficult decisions and extra work involved in regeneration, but the payoffs can be dramatic.  There are some good habits we can develop to hold ourselves accountable to fixing what needs to be fixed:

  • Trajectory Visioning:  We think of vision casting as developing grandiose plans for the future, but visioning can also include careful imagining of what the months and years ahead will look like if we hold steady on our current course.  For any program or policy, it’s worthwhile to make an assessment based on what things will look like if we keep doing the same thing we are doing now.  Adjustments can be made, resources reallocated, and “change teams” can be established based on those assessments (not just waiting for things to crumble).
  • Regular Assessments:  This, rather than future casting, is the simple process of having an established schedule for periodically evaluating how things are going, based on feedback from teams, staffs, volunteers, and end-users.  I include it here because it is consistently astonishing how few ministries have regularly scheduled assessments of their current, ongoing initiatives.  Few have any established collection of feedback.  This lack of evaluation and input is the sure path to maintaining the status quo.
  • Remembering Useful Mantras:  “This is only going to get worse.”  It’s like the crack in my Adirondack chair or the painful beard-pulling of a habit-prone blogger.  A problematic, painful situation is not going to get miraculously better.  Action must be taken to alleviate the pain, and as distressing as dealing with a fix may be, it will be less troublesome in the long run than letting things continue to deteriorate.

A lot of broken local ministry models seem to come down to the wrong personnel being in the wrong spots, but many times we have placed people in untenable positions by how we have designed the system in which they are working.

Journalist Anne Helen Peterson wrote about this phenomenon this week in an essay at her Culture Study website called, “Are People Bad at Their Jobs… Or Are the Jobs Just Bad?”  It’s a deep dive into the current American economic situation – because what she tends to do is take insightful deep dives – but the basic premise carries over into our discussion of sorta broken ministry.  Badly designed job descriptions curse people to poor performance.  Ill-defined goals and ramshackle ministry systems complicate the work of people who really would like to serve their constituents.

Peterson uses several examples of bad customer service to illustrate her premise, including one in which a friend tried to hire a gig worker through Angi to assemble a new bed, and the process went utterly awry.  The worker had no idea what they were doing, but Peterson says maybe the real problem is not the individual but the system:

What makes a job bad? Take a look at Angi, which, like food delivery apps, Thumbtack, Taskrabbit, Instacart, and hundreds of other “gig economy” employers, promises consumers cheap ease: just a few clicks, and some part of your life will be easier. In reality, the business model that creates both the cheapness and the ease makes the end product significantly worse: the only way the company can make a profit is by taking a significant cut off the top of the service and by exclusively hiring part-time “independent contractors” (and thus circumventing labor laws; economist David Weil calls this phenomenon “the fissured workplace.”)

. . . .

If you wanted to reverse engineer a job to ensure that the people doing it would do it badly, you’d build something like Angi. It doesn’t provide training. It doesn’t provide tools. It doesn’t provide benefits, or job security, or anything close to a living wage. If you get better at assembling, or if you’re so good you amass a client base, you can bet you’re not doing those jobs through Angi anymore.

Churches are well known for hiring people for specific jobs which are then under-resourced or plagued with unclear supervisory trees or given assignments wildly incompatible with the real conditions on the ground.  We set people up to fail!

There’s a better way, as evidenced by my last link for this week’s blog, this article reprinted in The Orlando Sentinel about the Southeastern Conference’s seemingly sudden emergence as a basketball powerhouse in this year’s March Madness tournament. Here was a system that had been kinda sorta working (SEC basketball), but was not consistently competitive, until leadership came along and said, “Let’s fix this.  Let’s stop settling for sometimes good, and let’s shoot instead for consistently excellent.”  It’s an example of leaders refusing to settle for adequate and devoting time, focus, and resources to doing better.  And it worked!  The article’s title, if you care to read it, is indicative of just how well it delivered: “SEC on Top of Hoops Hierarchy: Football powerhouse league now king of college basketball.”

The article is an analysis of what the Southeastern Conference did to kickstart a new era, and they did it – as successful efforts are so always triggered – by bringing in a person who was passionate about the vision:

A good place to begin is 2016, when Greg Sankey took over as the commissioner. The SEC landed only three schools in the NCAA Tournament that year, and Sankey did not accept any excuses from coaches, athletic directors and administrators.

One of his first calls was to Mike Tranghese, the old Big East commissioner, who came aboard as a consultant. The next was to Dan Leibovitz, a former coach with NBA ties, who became associate commissioner in charge of basketball. When Leibovitz took over the Big East, Sankey brought in Garth Glissman, who had been vice president of basketball operations for the NBA.

In other words, Sankey brought in basketball minds to lead a basketball resurrection.

Out with the old, in with the new.  Nothing fixes a broken system like bringing in new talent, and we should always have new talent waiting in the wings.  We should always be on the lookout for people who want to be a part of our vision.  And we should always be training people for their shot at leadership.  Truthfully, in ministry, we should be building models where all leadership is temporary – that is, we might move from one passion to another, but we should understand that we are most effective when we are cycling in new people with new perspectives and fresh takes.  And when things are entering the era of stagnation or circumstances call for new directions, there is nothing to be ashamed of when we need to get out of the way and let others take the helm.  That is a kind of courage, not failure.

This week’s blog is designed to provoke conversation among teams.  When are we settling on “good enough” in our own local ministry, and how could we make things better with an appropriate reorientation of focus, resources, time, and personnel?  How are things going where you serve?  Are you puttering along with a kinda sorta working system, or could you use a reboot?