How fast are we willing to fail?

"It’s important that nobody gets mad at you for screwing up. We know screwups are an essential part of making something good. That’s why our goal is to screw up as fast as possible."

—Lee Unkrich, director of Toy Story 3

I ran across this quote the other day and it really jazzed me up in regards to the life of the church. What I mean is that we seem to have a great aversion (generally speaking) to failure in the life of the church. I have yet attended a clergy meeting which everything was not a 'success'. If there are failures that are brought up in conversations, I am not privy to those conversations.

So I share this quote with you, those readers who humble me with your time, in order to ask the question, "When and where was the last time you failed in ministry?"

Are you failing fast enough?

I will post tomorrow the last time I failed.

JUDGE AND SAVIOR TO CULTIVATOR

Suppose, for a moment, there is a man named James. James was set up on a blind date with a woman named Julie. When James and Julie identify one another in the restaurant and are seated by the host, and the waitress begins to place water on the table James begins the conversation saying, “When I saw you I knew right away there was something about you that I found interesting. You know what it is? You were born with one leg slightly longer than the other leg, which is why you walk with a bit of a limp. It is no big deal but I think you should see my doctor so she can have a look at it and maybe straighten you up a bit.” What does Julie do?

Or suppose for a moment, you walk along the street in Fort Worth with some friends who are trying to cheer you up after a long day at work. You turn to enter into a local business establishment, when someone you do not know says to you, “I know why you are sad and I know exactly what will cheer you up. You need to give more back to your community by volunteering.” What do you do?

As silly as these scenarios are, I have encountered non-Christians who have experienced Christianity as people who act like James and the unknown person. We have the stigma of meeting people, telling them what their problem is (sin) and then share with them the solution (Jesus). The Church becomes the judge and savior to people. Could this be why 87% of people outside the Church aged 16-29 view Christians as “Judgmental” (See the book Unchristian)? Yet not even Christ himself came to condemn or judge the world (John 3:17). Rather, Jesus spent much of his time talking with people (verses talking AT people). Jesus spent years on this earth cultivating relationships. He has a circle of 12 and an inner circle of 3. He listened to the man born blind and cultivated a relationship with him (John 9).

So I challenge all those who would take on the mantle of “Cultural Architect” to move away from judging and trying to save people and move into a life of cultivating as many relationships as we can. What would it look like if we stopped watching some of the reality television which makes us feel superior to others and called an estranged friend or family member? What would it look like if we stopped pointing our fingers at the proverbial liberals/conservatives and tied to listen to others with opposing views to work toward a compromise? I am not sure but I think that looks a little like the Kingdom of God.

DUALISTIC WORLDVIEW TO SACRED WORLDVIEW

In the beginning God gathered the waters together and dry land appeared. God saw that this was good. Moses encounters a bush that is on fire but is not consumed. When he moves toward the burning bush and he hears these words, “Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” When Jesus died in the Gospel of Matthew, the temple curtain was torn from top to bottom, removing the only barrier between the people and the “holy of holies” in the temple.

What do these three stories share? All of them point to an idea that is has been in Christian tradition since the beginning in Antioch but since the enlightenment has been forgotten. With the dawn of the enlightenment, and the rise of science as a valid way to understand and learn about the world, humanity quickly learned to organize and categorize things in order to better understand the world around us. Animals were classified into Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, and Species. We organized a separate order for plants. The rise of the industrial revolution leads to humans creating time into distinguishable blocks. There was time for work, time for home and family, time for play and time for worship. We have become masters at categorizing the world around us like a giant waffle.

However, the walls of the waffle are breaking down all around us with the advent of the internet, social media, cell phones and TiVo. We can do work from home and set our home coffee maker from work. Where once we had to block of time to fly and see friends, now we connect through Skpye and webcams. We ‘pause’ live T.V. in order to answer a phone call from work. As we break down the walls around us, it feels like we are in the midst of the temple curtain being torn. There is no longer a set time for work and only work. There is no longer a set time for play and only play. As such, we have to begin to shift our thinking away from there is a set time for church. The ground Moses stood on did not ‘become’ holy. Rather, the ground, according to Genesis, was already holy; Moses just became aware of it. We need to be like Moses and become aware that all ground and time is sacred. I invite all cultural architects to join with me to begin to break down the waffle walls around us in order to allow the Spirit of God to move as freely as possible. Who knows, you might be waking by a burning bush not only in worship on a Sunday but by the water cooler on Thursday.