Progress through Failure

"If you're not failing regularly, you're definitely not making much progress."
-- Robin Sharma

I read lots of business books and business writers. Perhaps it's a residual habit from my previous life in sales. I like to think it's more about my fascination with the general business tendencies toward continuous improvement and customer satisfaction and what these twin motives might teach us in the congregational development world. Robin Sharma is one of my favorites. The quote above is from one of his recent blog posts: 50 New Rules of Work. You can read the other 49 at http://www.robinsharma.com

What called me up short in this quote is the recognition of the tremendous amount of energy in congregational life invested in "not failing". I suspect we fear failing because we so often feel our congregations are barely holding their own -- declining budgets, aging congregations, shrinking Sunday attendance -- if we fail, the thinking goes, we might lose pledge income or people...and if enough of those failures happen, our congregations may die. All of a sudden we are paralyzed. Inaction is deemed safer than failure. We become so concerned with preservation, innovation is sacrificed as too risky. Of course we don't use that sort of language. We dress it up in ecclesiastical excuses: "That's not who we are," or "That's not in keeping with our tradition," or "Our judicatory would never put up with something like that." I've been guilty of saying stuff just like this. Seminary, after all, trained me to manage and maintain, not lead and coach a congregation through the experience of failure.

Often, in planning meetings, I've asked (or been asked), "What great thing would this congregation undertake if we knew we couldn't fail?" I think maybe that's the wrong question. Maybe a better question is, "What are we so convinced God is calling us to do that we will invest, wholeheartedly, our time, our talent and our money, to go all out in its pursuit -- even if it means we could fail colossally?"

Wow! Who knows what we might discover about ourselves in that sort of process? And God only knows the sort of progress we could make!

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