It’s hard to talk about success in the church
It’s hard to talk about failure too, and that needs to change
I was having a conversation with a group of my clergy colleagues recently. “It can be hard to talk about success in the church,” one parish priest noted with dismay. “Nobody wants to hear about it.”
I could feel my stomach clench as they said these words. We had been sharing about the amazing and successful things each person in the group was doing in their churches. Their accounts were hopeful, exciting, inspiring. And also, that clench in the pit of my stomach affirmed in a visceral way for me the truth of their words. I didn’t want to say it out loud, especially in a group where we were establishing enough trust to be able to share what is really going on, but my colleague’s talk about their success felt unnerving and threatening. It’s hard to talk about success in the church because it’s hard to hear about it.
Of course, I am not literally threatened by someone else’s church growth, so their words and my clench required some further consideration. I have been part of a lot of interesting and life-giving initiatives and some traditional markers of growth in congregational development, and they are right—it can be lonely and quiet when those things are happening. Clergy who are struggling don’t want to hear about the challenges, excitements and discoveries of growth. It can feel like bragging when we insist on naming success out loud.
I have also tried things that don’t work, or don’t work the way I had hoped and dreamed. The last few years have been challenging and rebuilding has been slow. And all of this is hard to talk about too. “Failure,” however we may experience that in ministry, is lonely and quiet as well.
I don’t want to be that person who doesn’t want to hear about someone else’s booming attendance and surplus budgets. I don’t want that clench in my stomach closing my ears to the good things happening in other churches. In my mind I know that my colleague’s success is important to understand, I know that creating space for them to talk is good for the overall health of the church, not just for the sake of being a good colleague.
That clench in my stomach tells me another truth though — a truth that can overrule my rational brain and good judgement if I’m not careful.
The truth is that ministry is also competition. And competition is not unrelated to the sweep of secularism that is so changing the church’s place in society. A recent review in The Atlantic Daily, of the new book The Great Dechurching, analyzes the reasons for the ongoing exodus of North Americans from organized religion. It reaches an interesting conclusion: most haven’t left because their beliefs have changed or because of harm they have experienced at the hands of the church.
“[The Great Dechurching] suggests that the defining problem driving out most people who leave is… just how American life works in the 21st century. Contemporary America simply isn’t set up to promote mutuality, care, or common life. Rather, it is designed to maximize individual accomplishment as defined by professional and financial success.”
It is instead, the article claims, that we have “adopted a way of life that has left us lonely, anxious, and uncertain of how to live in community with other people.”
This societal change has a significant shrinking effect on the slice of the population interested in any way in participating in organized religion. It has an effect across churches as we essentially compete for a smaller and smaller share of the “market.” And it certainly has an effect on our being able to lay down our defences to talk honestly about what is working and what isn’t in our individual faith communities.
In fact, the difficulty in talking about both failure and success in ministry is connected intimately to the decline we are facing, as well as to the anxious leadership to which we so easily succumb in the face of that decline. There’s also the deep-seated grief and burnout in church leaders and congregations, trying to do more with less, and seeing something that we love (and to which we have devoted our lives) decline before our very eyes.
Developing a church culture that is relentless in creating safe space to talk openly—with curiosity and a learner’s heart—isn’t just important for addressing the jealousy and insecurity, the guilt and grief, that can be so rife in our churches. It’s also important for dialing in to the truth of who the church is and why it matters, even in the face of decline and especially in response to secularism.
The truth is that we’re not a collection of single-cell organisms called to compete for diminishing resources. We are a Body. In every way, our collective life needs to speak back to the “survival of the fittest” mentality we adopt as a second skin — no matter how imperfect our witness may be.
We can support and learn from one another by being clear about the context in which we find ourselves: that secularism is on the rise, institutional religion is declining, and we are caught up in societal changes that are not within our control. Yet also, we are not left powerless or orphaned. We can listen. We can learn. We can be honest.
We can lean into the gift of community and the collective wisdom God has entrusted to us to share. We can lean into the gift of community as the life-giving response that it is to a world that has been left “lonely, anxious, uncertain” and driven to maximize individual accomplishment over and against common life.
The word “disciple” simply means student. And at every turn in Jesus’ ministry, he is calling together a community of faith and making it clear that if we want to love God, we have to figure that out together. These realities lead us to understand that we are here to learn and grow, and we do so in the context of our relationship and community with one another.
The things that fall apart can be the fertile ground for new life. The pinnacles of achievement can be precarious and dangerous, especially if we aren’t willing to look at them closely. The loneliness, guilt, grief and anxiety that permeates our churches can be soul destroying — both when things are working and when they aren’t. Idolatry can take over when we scapegoat and when we hero-worship, and the dismantling of idols is central to our faith tradition.
In the mindset of a community of students, there isn’t success or failure. There are just stories we need to tell, the movings of the Spirit we need to discern, the life of the Body we are called to be, and the ways in which what is happening now will help teach us the things we need for what is coming next.
