Episcopal Church Foundation Vestry Papers - for leading congregations

I recently spent a morning on a cascade of blunders. I made one mistake after another, arrived late, forgot key information, failed to carry out my mission, and drove 30 entirely useless miles. It was a total loss.

On the freeway heading home, I seriously thought about making up a less embarrassing cover story. But there was a point in my life when I committed to living in the light of the truth, even when the truth cast me in an unflattering light. At the moment I accepted that I had failed utterly, I felt an overwhelming sense of relief. And I felt closer to God. At my most fully human, I could be glad that God was God, and that my deep imperfection is not the end of the story.

I’m not alone in finding myself closer to God in failure than in success. St. Paul speaks of boasting in weakness, and finding the depth of his faith in suffering. Our sacred stories are riddled with examples of God’s ability to make something of less than nothing, to build on the unsteadiest of rocks. Jesus’ ministry appeared to end in abject failure. Crowds of thousands dwindled to a motley few at the foot of the cross. The disciples fled. A promising young life ended in a messy and shameful death. The center of our Christian life is rooted in a spectacular failure.

Despite all we know about God and failure, we push ahead in our quest for churchly success. We polish our online presence, valiantly edit grammatical errors out of our bulletins, evaluate the quality of our coffee hours, even pump up the numbers on our parochial reports.

I wonder what it would look like if the church gave up on being a success. What if we were honest about the crumbling of our beloved institution, and our vast uncertainty about what to do next? What might that free us to do and to be in our communities going forward?