Steve Norman, friend of my friend Chris Frank, posted a link to his Christianity Today article, My Bitter Quesadilla. Starting with an incident many years ago when a close friend of his left the church Steve had started, he talks about failure and how to handle it, and it is a pretty good article. However, I believe it has one major weakness: it sees failure in a family leaving a church, and in a Protestant, Evangelical context I find that very problematic. One thing that ought to characterize us as Christians rooted in the Bible is that because we know that now we see in a glass darkly we hold our convictions lightly, admitting that we might be wrong about one or more aspects. Therefore, we should always be willing to be gracious to people who come to the conclusion that our way of doing church is not the best way for them, and that they need to move on to some place where they can better follow their own convictions. To suggest that the family who left might have been driven by a consumer mentality is not gracious; to suggest that they were not willing to engage the culture as this church did, is not gracious; to suggest that they could not distinguish between issues of first importance and those more negligible is not gracious. And even though Steve then backed off and said that it wasnt just this familys fault, nor was it just his own fault for having failed them in some fashion, but that the truth was somewhere in the middle, I think he is still off: Perhaps it wasnt anybodys fault. Perhaps there is no blame to be assigned. Perhaps we should admit that God might be leading some people somewhere else. As I said, Steves article has a lot of good to say about failure and how to handle it; perhaps one of the most important lessons to learn is that there is enough real failure in the world, and we do not construct failure where there is none. I would have posted this as a comment on Steves timeline, but since were not FB friends that was not possible. t.co/7I6aNxooxD
Posted on: Tue, 25 Mar 2014 09:46:52 +0000