by Eddie Pipkin

Image by Alexa from Pixabay

As a long-suffering Orlando Magic basketball fan, it was worthy of celebration last week when our young, scrappy team made it to the NBA playoffs.  They acquitted themselves well this season, finishing in the top five in the Eastern Conference and avoiding the dreaded post-season play-in tournament.  It was the culmination of a seasons long reboot that team management had patiently advocated, to the chagrin of many fans.  But the fruit of their vision is now ripe – with great prospects for the future – and their faithful dedication to the plan is laudable.  As ministry leaders, do we have that kind of stick-to-itivness?  Or do we too often wilt in the face of opposition and doubt?

Of course, by the time this blog is published, the Magic are two games down in the series and on the brink of elimination, but that just sets up heightened drama for their underdog comeback story!  (Haha.)  Not that it means the season will be a disappointment even if they flame out in the first round.  Au contraire!  This season has been a certified success if you take the long view, and it is a steppingstone to good times to come in the years ahead.  The building blocks have been put in place; the foundation has been established in rock-solid fashion; the stage has been set.  The team management reset the roster for the rebuild, jettisoning some talented players a couple of years back (and thus forfeiting a chance to be immediately good in those years, although not great – they would have been good enough to perhaps make the playoffs, but never talented enough to advance).  They instead set their sights on building a young and talented core group that would need a few seasons to learn the ropes and reach their prime.  And now here we are.

The people in charge made some hard (and often unpopular) decisions.  They invited temporary pain in the pursuit of long-term higher gain.

And they were right.

Church leaders – leaders of any organization or institution – are faced with this vision dilemma on a regular basis.  Do we keep scraping along with something we know is not really working just to preserve blasé results and avoid the pain of change.  Or do we dare to boldly embrace change (with a clearly articulated purpose and a plainly communicated strategy for getting to the ultimate goal)?  It’s tough to set the ship of ministry on a new course, but it’s even more challenging to stay on course when the passengers and crew are expressing hysteria over ice bergs real and imagined.

We face many types of misery along the rocky path to the summit:

  • The pain of letting popular players go to other teams because they are not the best option for the future. This is very difficult terrain for local church decision makers.  Sometimes, when a rebuild is at hand, there are people in visible leadership positions who are talented and beloved whose skill set and outlook are just not going to work with the new vision.  If that person is gracious and humble, they can sometimes be eased into a new role, but if they are resistant, vocal, or encouraging the naysayers, they must be lovingly sacrificed (and aided in finding a soft landing where they can continue to be useful).  At other times, even when they are gracious and humble, they are so large a presence in the community that their continued involvement would inevitably overshadow new people and new ideas; in that case, too, it’s healthiest for all if they move on to a new thing for them.  Making these kinds of tough decisions, however, can have enormous impact.  People have very strong emotional ties to leaders with whom they have history.  It is one of the most difficult processes in ministry to manage: jettisoning a beloved figure.
  • The pain of enduring constant Monday morning quarterbacking. Not just in the example listed in the previous bullet point, but at all times that change is required, people will second-guess your decisions (and, yes, I have mixed my sports metaphors with references to both basketball and football, but you get the drift: no matter what sport you’re coaching and type of play you’re calling, somebody in the stands will insist there was a better call you could have made).  These negative instances are reduced in an atmosphere where we do our best to provide direct, honest, oft-repeated communication and in which we give people buy-in to the process, but even the best of these measures will not eliminate the uncomfortable catcalls from the sidelines.
  • The pain of putting in the work to do things right. Pursuing a vision requires laying lots of groundwork and turning back to excellence in the supporting fundamentals.  This means dedication to craft and reinforcement of purpose, and that means hard work and lots of it.  This reality may be even more responsible for church leadership’s unwillingness to stick to difficult projects than the other chief motive for throwing in the towel: avoidance of conflict.  The details, once we are fully into them, may just turn out to be too hard or too controversial for what we can stomach.  The best way to endure our discouragement is to keep the goal front and center at all times – to remember what we’re working for.
  • The pain of enduring a “losing season” while we are putting in the work of doing things right. Many of the traditional metrics by which our performance is judged – things like attendance and donations – may struggle while we are in the transitional stage, especially if conflict becomes an issue.  We have to be prepared for these eventualities and manage them to be the temporary seasons of change they will be before the new vision establishes itself.  We can neither pretend that there will not be dips, nor can we panic when the dips manifest.  We should prepare people for these near certain eventualities, and we should have a plan for getting through the troughs.

We will experience all of this and more whenever we are implementing a new vision.  Part of the leadership process in these seasons is doing the due diligence of armoring ourselves and our teams against these predictable stumbling blocks.  It is senseless to pretend that these tough moments and laborious stretches are not going to happen.  They are!  Instead, we can strengthen our connections and expand our toolkit, so we are able to persevere with grace and lead with empathy – and in so doing, of course, we not only move towards the stated goal, but we also gain the benefit of the hard work involved – we are stronger and better because of it, as is always the case for any worthwhile effort.

And if we tough it out with the right motivations and the right attitude, the celebration in the end will be all the sweeter.

AND NOW A BONUS

As I was working on the blog this week, this great article from Time found its way to my inbox.  It’s about the science behind intuition, and since, as ministry leaders, we depend upon intuition as one of the inputs to guide the myriad ministry decisions we make, it’s a topic worthy of exploration.

Here’s a quote:

[Intuition is] an elegant, fine-tuned, and incredibly rapid form of perception. Intuition is a form of cognition meant to guide us and alert us to things we might not otherwise be able to see.

When we speak about our intuition, we often talk of it as a feeling. Something “feels” off, though we can’t necessarily explain why.

We’ve all had gut feelings that we can’t explain. Sometimes, a decision you’re making seems reasonable but doesn’t feel right. Conversely, you may be compelled to do something that seems unreasonable but feels right. The brain is always receiving, perceiving, and processing information that leads you to gain knowledge our logical mind doesn’t always understand or have access to.

Of course, intuition for us is tied inextricably with the work of the Holy Spirit, but it’s cool to see the way science accounts for the process.  The article is worth a read: “The Science of Intuition – and How to Tune Into Your Own.”  By understanding the mechanism better, we can better put it to use.  The article explains practical steps that open our minds to honoring our intuition and taking advantage of it as part of our decision-making process.

Thoughts of your own on these or any other topics?  That’s what the comments section is for!