Failure as faithfulness

Familiar Bible stories can be some of the hardest to read as adults. The children’s Sunday school versions, with their accompanying crafts and upbeat sing-alongs, can obscure the full range of nuance and complexity in a given passage. Take the parable of the sower from Matthew 13.

In all the illustrations I’ve seen, the sun is out, the sower happily scattering seeds over an artfully textured ground. Given the bounty in the “good soil” harvest, the seeds that aren’t so lucky don’t seem to matter. The classroom drawings never fully capture the scope of loss present in the story — the seeds pulverized in the bird’s beak, withered by the sun among the rocks, strangled by the weeds.

Suddenly, this cheery parable fills me with discomfort. Why wasn’t the sower more careful? Surely there are ways she might have minimized the risk and maximized the yield.

I feel frustrated that the sower seems entirely unconcerned about failure. As she walks, she tosses handfuls of seeds to fall where they will. Some will grow; most will not. No attention is given to the soil quality. The sower simply keeps on sowing.

I’ve realized that this reading is challenging me to reconsider the parable’s lesson. Perhaps this story is more about consistent faithfulness and less about engineering results. But that is not what I want to hear in a moment of great change and uncertainty for the mainline church in America.

Congregations are aging. Membership numbers are declining. Churches are closing their doors and selling their properties at an unprecedented rate. This does not seem like the moment to be scattering our limited precious seeds with abandon.

And yet what if this is the exact right moment for the church to be taking risks and embracing failure?

Jeremy Utley and Perry Klebahn lead and teach at Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design. They help organizations innovate in a rapidly changing world by cultivating cultures of experimentation — what, for the church, could be seen as the spiritual disciplines of listening, humility, courage and holy playfulness all rolled into one.

In their book “Ideaflow,” they write, “What are the chances you’ll make an interesting discovery doing something in the exact same way you always have?”

I wonder what this imagination might do for the church. If doing what we always have is no longer working, could this be the moment to experiment and try something new? Sometimes an experiment will produce 30 times what was sown. Sometimes an experiment will fail. Often it takes many failures before a successful solution is found. Recall the story of the light bulb.

I believe failure is essential for vibrant congregations. But failing is scary. In order to survive, the church must create a culture where failure is expected, welcomed and even celebrated.

Utley and Klebahn offer some suggestions on creating this kind of culture.

First, individuals and groups need to feel a sense of safety in order to take risks. When we’re afraid that we’ll fail — or that we or our ideas will be judged, laughed at or dismissed — our creative ability withers. Our brains (and that infamous entity called the church committee) are masters at naming why new ideas won’t work. While this instinct can keep us safe, it can also be wrong. We don’t always know where the good soil is. Scattering with abandon creates opportunities for learning and even surprise.

To scatter with abandon, shift the goal from finding “good” ideas to simply getting as many ideas out on paper as possible. Get playful. Bring snacks and colorful Post-it notes. Ask a middle schooler to join the conversation. Pull your chairs into a circle or move to a space with lots of light and big posters on the walls. At this stage, the goal is quantity over quality. The only rule is that ideas cannot be judged or deliberated.

Initially, ideas might come slowly and feel obvious. Keep going! One leader who uses the ideaflow process told Utley and Klebahn that it’s always excruciating for her — but only at the start. “As soon as she gives herself permission to write something truly outrageous, ridiculous or just plain illegal,” they write, “the floodgates open.”

Second, make space in the schedule to fail. Utley and Klebahn write, “To learn something new, you must try new things, and experiments always have a risk of failure. To take that kind of risk regularly, you can’t chase 99 percent efficiency every moment of your day.”

Not every new idea will bring in more young people or help balance the budget. But when framed with intention, every new idea is a learning opportunity for a congregation. Start talking about the congregation’s latest experiment and the learnings it produced, regardless of how well it achieved the anticipated results.

Utley and Klebahn note Thomas Edison’s response to a friend who lamented Edison’s lack of results on a project despite his hard work: “Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results! I know several thousand things that won’t work.”

Not every project needs to be “the solution” as long as we are able to learn from it.

A few Sundays ago, I heard a pastor retell the parable of the sower and recount the harvest it produced as “thirty-, sixty- and even one hundredfold.” That’s how Mark 4 tells the story, but it’s not what Matthew says. Instead of saving the largest, most remarkable yield for the end, Matthew’s version says the yield was “in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty” (Matthew 13:23 NRSVue) — concluding with the smallest. Even the smallest yield is worthy of note, Matthew seems to be saying.

Failure happens when we take risks. Our call is to be faithful sowers who scatter with abandon.

Keri L. Day sees a unique space in theological education for Black students and professors, and it contributed to the title of her new book.

The associate professor at Princeton Theological Seminary wrote “Notes of a Native Daughter: Testifying in Theological Education” as part of the Theological Education Between the Times series. One of the things she explores is the presence of both harm and hope in the academy.

“[There are] both the deep experiences of structural racism and a number of Black students as well as faculty members knowing that they have contributed and they have shaped theological education in profoundly important ways,” Day said.

Faith & Leadership: You write about how the theological academy is “a site of both harm and hope,” a site of both repression and affirmation, for racially marginalized groups. That is such a powerful image. Can you talk about it a bit more?

Keri Day: I’m thinking, for example, of how African American students come to the theological academy, say to Princeton Theological Seminary. On the one hand, they feel at times not heard, not seen, because the theologians that they’re studying are white, with particular kinds of experiences that are not their own cultural experiences. Or particular points that they make on a theological level do not resonate with those in the primarily dominant white class.

They feel themselves as needing to not just be understood but to prove themselves, that they too can participate in the intellectual “world building,” as we would call it in the context of theological education. That’s harm, a site of harm. It’s a site or a context where African American students and faculty begin to question themselves, their abilities to move through the context — what can they actually contribute to the context — because they feel so inadequate.

On the other hand, it’s also been a site of hope. The same students that come from the Princeton Theological Seminary will find themselves deeply tooled by classes that they’ve taken. Maybe they’ve come out of a church that is deeply conservative and doesn’t support Black women in ministry, does not support Black queer people. When they come to the seminary, they’re able to find and discover intellectual and theological tools that will allow them to make a case, to speak and affirm their own perspectives, and maybe those perspectives are not embraced within the context of the Black church or within the context of Black community.

In that way, it’s a site of hope, because here they do feel confirmed in their perspective. They do feel affirmed that they’re wanting to think more progressively about the world around them and about different experiences along lines of gender and sexuality. Here you have, again, this double consciousness that W.E.B. Du Bois speaks about — that they experience theological education on the one hand as still repressive in these kinds of ways that I mentioned but on the other hand as a site of profound possibility.

F&L: You have described parts of your book as a testimony. For those who do not know what it is to testify or understand what a rich and powerful part that is of some people’s theological experience, can you explain it?

KD: In this tradition that I grew up in, what made testifying so powerful was that it certainly is an individual act, in the sense that the individual is standing and declaring one’s own truth. In the moment of testifying, you are speaking your truth, your experience of God and the divine, your experience of the world, who you are.

There might be some people in the room who may not like what you’re declaring about what God has done for you or what you’ve experienced by way of struggles and victories through the week as you stand up in church and you basically speak what your experience has been with God and with the world and with yourself. But here you are. It’s a profoundly individual act.

But here is the key to the power of testifying and testimony: it is not only an individual speaking one’s truth; testifying is also a collective act. Part of what grants testifying or testimony its power is that presumably there is an audience or community on the other end that is waiting to hear and move into the experience with you.

When one got up in my tradition and testified to what God had done, one also knew that what made it a powerful moment is the community affirming by way of oohs and aahs, by way of saying “Amen,” by way of saying, “You better tell it!”

This call-and-response format is a way of the community affirming for individuals that they are heard, that their experience is valid, that basically the individual is right in speaking the truth that he or she knows to be true.

For me, the power at a metaphorical level, in my book of testimony and talking about theological education, is that part of what the theological academy has to do is be that community who is willing to participate in this powerful ethical moment. Not just a theological moment. It’s an ethical moment of affirming that what the individual — in this case, the native daughter, the native son, the African American student or faculty — that what they speak is important, that it needs to be heard, that it needs to be affirmed.

When it is heard, when it is affirmed in a collective manner, then that testimony becomes a form of knowledge about who we are as a community literally — not just about who I am as an individual speaker but about who we are. It becomes the truth of the collective, something that needs to be lived into by the community.

F&L: You end this book where you could not possibly have known you would when you began — in the pandemic. How do you think that made it different?

KD: I started this book a year and something before the pandemic hit, and in some ways I did have to go back and I had to reframe the book based on the pandemic. Because to me, it was in the pandemic that I was able to see in some ways the unrelenting nature of structural oppression. The pandemic more deeply exposed the unrelenting burden of structural racism on Black community, on Black students within theological education, on Black faculty.

I want to be clear: it doesn’t mean that other faculty who are not Black didn’t have issues. But what I am saying, as an example, is that I had a number of my students that come from communities that were hard hit by the pandemic because their communities have few resources, so they were more vulnerable. They were more susceptible to COVID. Many of them, Black students, had family members who lived in more economically disadvantaged neighborhoods and had COVID and were in serious condition, and [I saw] the burden that placed on these students, in the middle of online education, to perform.

They would come to me about their white professors, some of the very problematic responses in pedagogies that were operating, and in some ways a lack of desire by some professors to really understand the community that these students come out of and how their academic performance is actually affected by being Black in America, basically. It actually did call upon me to go back and to reshape some of what I wrote.

The postscript that I wrote to the book, the last few pages, I went back around to put the question mark back in the air. You get the sense that in the fourth chapter it is a prayer that I have of community, of theological education listening to native daughters and sons, of a kind of great gathering, of a beloved community.

But as a postscript, when I started writing about the pandemic, the question mark reemerges. Is it possible? It’s this sort of tension that I do want the reader to live inside of, where I talk about having students that felt like they were the problem. They were treated as if they were a problem because of all they were going through, given the community that they are a part of and how disproportionately these communities were affected, and them needing to balance what they do academically with this reality of their community and their family.

All of that brings back, Is it possible for theological education to truly listen? The question mark, again, reemerges. It’s this tension of what I was hoping to accomplish in the text. This tension reemerging by the time the reader ends the book, the postscript, that the theological academy is a site of both harm and hope.

F&L: What else would you like people to know about this book, about the process, or about what you hope they will take away from it?

KD: To the president and the dean of a theological institution, you must no longer take on a managerial position when it comes to the institution, just managing the institution according to what has happened in the past, just trying to preserve what the institution has been. To the president and the dean, after reading this book, I hope you take away that you must have bold, risk-taking vision in helping to release theological education into a more liberative future as it relates to race and gender.

To the faculty, to the faculty of color, to the Black faculty, testify. That in and of itself is often very hard and can be a dangerous thing if you’re on tenure track. But find ways to testify. Sometimes it’s therapeutic to ourselves to be able to just testify in safe spaces.

To the white faculty member, truly become an ally, as I talk about in this book, by attending to the policies and the structures of the institutions. It’s not enough to speak that I’m an ally or I have a good Black girlfriend or he is a good colleague of mine at my institution. Really stand up in the policy decision making of the institution and promote equity for Black students and Black faculty.

To the prospective student that wants to enroll in theological education, the groundwork has been laid down. We’re standing on the shoulders of others who in some way — and I don’t know if you can see this in my text, but I really try to give honor to those who have come before. I’m not just talking about what it means to be Black in theological education or a Black woman, but I’m also telling a story about how Black women have actually shaped theological education. I want the prospective student — white, Black, it doesn’t matter what ethnicity or race — I want them to be able to see that, to acknowledge that and to celebrate that.

“We’ve always done it this way!”

For decades, church leaders and committee members have sat in fellowship halls and church classrooms and around conference tables discussing future plans for their congregations.

Inevitably, someone utters those familiar six words: “We’ve always done it this way.”

At first, it can feel like an uninspired attachment to the past. But with deeper listening, you will recognize that it can be more about pride in the track record of the congregation. It’s more “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” and less “Over my dead body!”

“We’ve always done it this way” can be an important tether to church culture and long-standing tradition — but it can also be the chief barrier to innovation.

What if the pastors in the room saw themselves as innovation instigators?

When I was growing up, one of our favorite sayings was, “Why are you instigating?” It was a question that would come up whenever two or more folks were in the early stages of an argument or disagreement.

Inevitably, someone would come around to some version of, “I heard you said this …; I heard you said that …,” which would lead someone else in the conversation to ask, “Why are you instigating?” The rhetorical question in childhood settings was meant to draw out the reality that the instigator was bringing information to the forefront to fuel the fire and keep the intensity high.

I am by no means advocating for pastors to spark disagreements in committee meetings, but what would it look like to see ourselves as innovation instigators within our congregations? When a committee member gazes through rose-colored glasses at a church event from the past, how might pastors bring to the forefront the full picture rather than limiting the view to the committee’s highlight reel?

What would it look like to raise the internal challenges that accompanied an external win? Yes, the event was sold out, but was the church equipped to handle the crowd? Yes, the choir did a phenomenal job, but did they sing too long? Yes, elected officials showed up, but when their team misrepresented our event on their social media accounts, did we correct them?

Seeing ourselves as innovation instigators means being willing to hold the mirror up to ourselves and our team so that we can honestly examine the moments where things are working effectively and where they are not. The purpose of this work is not to deflate the pride that congregations have about who they are and what they’ve done but to work out the kinks so that every experience offered becomes better than the last. A culture of questions and critique helps churches both celebrate their wins and respond to their losses.

Innovation instigators don’t allow the team to let themselves off the hook when it comes to event evaluations. They stand in the tension to hold space for new normals to emerge when the old ways of doing things are no longer cutting it.

Rarely is the work of innovation done completely from scratch. We must look for innovative moments within ongoing practices. In other words, we may not be able to change the whole thing at once, but we can make significant changes along the way.

My dissertation adviser, L. Gregory Jones, now the president of Belmont University, calls this practice traditioned innovation. As he wrote with Andrew P. Hogue in “Navigating the Future: Traditioned Innovation for Wilder Seas,” traditioned innovation is “a way of thinking and living that holds the past and future together in creative tension.” Jones and Hogue went on to write: “We believe that the innovation that matters is innovation that draws on the best of the past, carrying forward its wisdom through ‘traditioned innovation.’” This framework has animated much of Jones’ work and even launched the Traditioned Innovation Project at Duke Divinity School.

With this context in mind, I’m calling for more of us to see ourselves as innovation instigators. We have the capacity to hold the past in one hand and the potential future in the other. I am more persuaded than ever in this post-2020 world that congregations have the capacity to innovate. We’ve proved it. The COVID-19 crisis forced churches across the nation to find ways to do church differently. Our “why” remained the same, but our “how” had to change. On that journey, we learned that we, the church universal, are capable of discovering new ways of solving problems.

While you cannot force innovation, you can create a culture that fosters innovative solutions to ongoing issues. Innovation instigators are those brave enough to ask the questions that unmask the real underlying challenges congregations face. Innovation instigators are those willing to disrupt the comfort of a church meeting to open the space up for honest reflection. While pastors cannot force members to think differently, pastors can raise the kinds of questions that draw out new answers. In this season, I implore you to instigate some change. Instigate some new ideas. Instigate toward innovation.

The years 2020-2022 taught us just how resilient we can be. Countless congregations learned new technologies under pressure. Innovation was at an all-time high. I believe that we still have within us that capacity to innovate. We did it under duress; now let’s attempt it in more neutral conditions. Let’s be innovation instigators.

Years ago, Ken faced a struggle in the downtown church where he was serving as a young associate pastor. On a return visit to Duke Divinity School, he described the dilemma to Robert Wilson, an approachable and curious member of the faculty.

Wilson listened, paused and then began to talk about a book he had co-written in 1974 called “What’s Ahead for Old First Church.” It draws on a three-year study of more than 300 downtown congregations in more than 100 cities.

“You know, that book has sold and sold and sold!” he said with a smile.

The question at the heart of the book, published almost 50 years ago, remains: What is the future for “First Churches” — those anchor institutions in our cities? Ken returned to the book amid the pandemic and was struck by how much in it still resonates today.

How do you know whether your congregation is a First Church? (Keep in mind that a First Church might be called Central or Trinity or be named for one of the saints.)

These institutions are often described with three words: quality, prestige and leadership. The book notes several signs of an Old First Church:

• Is an easily recognized urban landmark.
• Is a symbol of its denomination.
• Is a symbol of the role that religion plays in a city.
• Is instrumental in giving birth to new churches.
• Is known for excellence in worship and music.
• Counts among its membership persons of affluence.

There are also some less research-based signs: Does your church have a wall dedicated to 8-by-10 photos of pastors past? Do you have a ceramics room, complete with kiln and ceramic figurines? Do you find yourself talking about a nostalgic past, when the congregation carried more influence? If so, you might be a First Church.

For those of us who regard the downtown big-steeple church of 50 years ago as the height of the mainline, it’s important to note that the book also points to these traits of an Old First Church:

• Is in decline.
• Is surrounded by change.
• Has deferred maintenance.
• Has more money than people (although that may be in question).
• Has leadership in denial about the trends.
• Yearns for a pastor who can recapture the glory of former times.

Wilson and his co-author, Ezra Earl Jones, are clear about the problem: “A large number of Old First Churches are rapidly approaching a crisis point.” We were surprised to see this — 50 years ago, these churches were in crisis?

This runs against the grain of a common narrative, which sees a generation ago as the era of glory and success. Many of the artifacts displayed in First Churches reinforce such a perception; they hold up the past by honoring an influential pastor or lay leader, a very large Sunday School class or youth group, and evidence of their former position of prominence in the community.

We can only imagine that the book sold so much because it identifies the paralyzing tension that many First Churches find themselves facing — then and now. They must honor and maintain the church of the past for longtime members while also creating a new church with new people to continue the gospel message of Jesus.

So what’s next for Old First Church? We would suggest that First Churches practice a more truthful remembrance of the past in order to move more faithfully into the future. This process includes observation, interpretation and intervention. The authors of “What’s Ahead for Old First Church” engaged in this kind of exercise, and our own congregations merit the same intentional process.

First Churches often have long histories and complex narratives. At the same time, they might have a propensity to oversimplify what is going on — whether within their buildings, among their people or in their surroundings.

A more nuanced observation helps us understand the multilayered context in which these churches are located. Cities are contested spaces; denominations are themselves a changing landscape; workforces are departing from commercial centers and in different ways returning to them; and the nature of work, gathering and spirituality are being revised by digital access and experience.

Observation leads to interpretation. A deep practice of interpretation involves multiple conversation partners — often drawn from fields as diverse as urban planning, economic development and community organizing.

We addressed this in our book “Fresh Expressions of People Over Property,” and we also highly recommend “The Practice of Adaptive Leadership,” by Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow and Marty Linsky.

Ken often asks leaders of these churches, “Whom are you learning from?” A church in Miami can learn from a church in San Antonio, and the same church in Miami can facilitate learning with a church in Los Angeles.

After that groundwork, intervention is crucial. The absence of an intervention can be a kind of work avoidance or even a failure of nerve.

First UMC in Miami is one example of a church that was willing to live through a necessary change. Audrey led a multiyear reinvention of the church and has lived the book’s question.

What resulted flowed from the iterative process of observation (what was going on within and around First UMC Miami), interpretation (what was needed in the next generations among the dynamic mission field surrounding the church), and intervention (the destruction of what had been, the migration of worship to a new setting for over three years, and the design and creation of a new structure with expanded purposes and partnerships).

First UMC Miami wrestled with the question, “What’s ahead?” and came up with an answer. Other First Churches need to do the same for themselves. The answer to the question is unique to each geographical context, each collection of leaders and each congregational history.

What’s ahead for Old First Church? Our conversations with lay and clergy leaders convince us that this remains a crucial question. Yet we believe in those institutions. They can thrive — if they have the courage to embrace and honor the past while building a pathway toward the future that God dreams about for vital churches in living communities.