Failure Is Success

The frustration in the conference room was palpable. We were about 200 church leaders from various traditions and contexts, but almost all of us were struggling to meet expectations for growth in our ministries.  In a breakout session, we shared our experiences:

We had studied the trendy books written by the pastors of explosive megachurches - but had seen our own membership remain stagnant. We had emulated the innovative pastors who had started thriving alternative churches - but were still not drawing the “unchurched” to our churches. And we had struggled to match the legacy of that beloved former minister in our own congregation who had “brought in so many new families” - 20, 30, 40, or even 50 years in the past.

As we returned from the breakout to the larger group, the room was ready to explode with this frustration. At this conference, and at many others, we had heard preachers and speakers who were successful by these standards and who we all desperately wanted to be like. But most of us just can’t seem to replicate their success, despite our best efforts.

As the glow from the Christendom era and the post-World War II church boom 

fades, such successful leaders and their ministries are becoming a smaller and smaller piece of the larger reality. Even as their numbers might be growing, the overall picture of the church in North America is one of increasingly rapid decline that won’t be reversed. More and more of us are finding ourselves outside of the “success” bubble and feeling like failures.

That feeling finally bubbled over during the question and answer period after another speech from a successful church innovator. A man who looked to be in his mid-thirties stepped to the microphone and described the decade of work he’d done in trying to start new ministries. He’d endured a lot of ups and downs, and ultimately his ministries had not lasted.

But he was passionate in talking about what he had tried and what he had learned, and about how he wished there would be more speakers and more books published that reflect experiences like his. Then he said the words that made the frustrated room erupt in applause:

“Maybe it’s time we consider failure to be success. Not just the failure itself. Not that we just do something, it doesn’t work, and we go home feeling satisfied. But maybe success in this new era is not found in numbers, but in the willingness to try, and fail, and learn, and try again.”

After that conference, I gained a powerful new perspective on my own new church ministry - which is not succeeding by the numbers driven models of 20th century church planting - but which is succeeding at trying new ideas and discovering what works in this new post-Christian reality.  

Ultimately, a numbers-driven approach will produce a smaller and smaller bubble of “successful” churches and leaders. A “try and fail” approach leads toward redefining what the church and what Christian witness in the world will look like.

In the coming series of posts, I will dig deeper into this notion that “failure equals success” and how it is the key to embracing the new life that the Spirit is bringing forth.