Back when I was a lawyer, my partner and I used to joke that we should be allowed to charge more when we handled cases where we felt like we weren’t sure what we were doing. After all, practicing law is a lot harder when you do that way.
I bring this up because we’ve been without a parish secretary for the last week. That means that yours truly has been doing the secretarial work for the parish. This led me to quickly conclude two things:
1) secretaries are under-appreciated
2) I am not cut out to be a secretary
The reason I’m not cut out to be a secretary has nothing to do with typing, filing, answering phones, or any of that sort of thing. It has to do with the fact that a secretary constantly has to deal with office machines. The computer. The photocopier. The folding machine. All of those and more are things a secretary has to deal with every day.
I do not get along well with office machines. They do not get along well with me. This has always been true. This week, I tried to figure out why.
It occurred to me that much of my life has involved trying to persuade people with words. That’s much of what I did as a lawyer. That’s much of what I do as a pastor. Even the fun things I’ve done, such as amateur acting and songwriting, has to do with persuading people with words.
For much of my life, this has worked. When it comes to office machines, though, it doesn’t. You cannot persuade office machines with words. Believe me, I’ve tried. I’ve tried to encourage. I’ve tried to cajole. I’ve tried promises. I’ve tried threats. Nothing works. The photocopier continues to insist that there’s a paper jam, and it doesn’t care what I have to say about it. That means that, if I wanted to get the photocopier to work, I had to try a different approach.
It can be extremely frustrating when you do something that’s worked for years, and all of a sudden it doesn’t any more. The application that statement has to the church is probably obvious. A lot of churches have done things the same way for years. It used to work: many churches used to be strong and growing. Now, it doesn’t work: many of the same churches are now faltering. That means that our churches need to try a different approach.
The advantage to dealing with the photocopier is that it told me exactly where the paper jam was. I could not see it at first, but it turned out that the paper jam was right where the copier said it was. When I kept looking, and I eventually found it. When I found the problem and corrected it, the photocopier worked fine.
No one is going to come up to the people in a faltering church and tell them exactly where the problem is. In fact, most of the time it’s not as simple as just having one problem. It’s usually a combination of things, so that just changing one thing will not solve anything.
That can be frustrating too, of course. Still, the one thing we know is that if we change nothing, nothing will change. What it means is that we need to try a variety of things. That’s what we’ve started to do. It’s what we’ll continue to do.
Now, we won’t change everything, because not everything needs to be changed. I didn’t take the photocopier completely apart to get it working again. However, just as I needed to keep looking for ways to get the photocopier to work again, we need to keep looking for ways to get our churches working again, too.
Some of the things we try will work. Some won’t. That’s okay. You can learn as much, if not more, from things that don’t work than you can from things that do. There’s an old saying that while some people are afraid to try things for fear of feeling inferior, others try and fail and so become superior. That’s what we want to do, and that’s what we’re going to do.
Nobody’s going to come up to us and tell us exactly what the church needs to do. If we keep looking for solutions, though, we’ll eventually find them. We’ll find them, we’ll correct our errors, and our churches will move forward to be the churches God wants us to be.
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