His Friends: See What God Is Doing

A church consulting group produced a report on how to engineer church growth. They recommend using data analytics to understand your target audience, networking in the community, and building a structured onboarding process for new members. But none of their church growth tips included prayer. As long as a church ran its playbook with excellence, organizational growth was guaranteed.

The job posting for a senior pastor required "transformational leadership," "top-notch" Bible teaching, and meeting "standards of excellence." As I read through the twenty-four bullet points describing the church's ideal candidate, I felt exhausted. Perhaps some disciples of Jesus have ten times the stamina of the ordinary person, and this church will be faithfully shepherded by an outstanding pastor. Or perhaps what we demand from pastors sets a trap that guarantees their eventual failure.

Growing up, I sometimes felt jittery when dinner ran late, or I had more homework to do. I wanted to turn on the TV and watch MacGyver. I loved seeing him get into impossible situations, surrounded by thugs, and then jerry-rigging a way to use duct tape and paperclips to save the day. MacGyver was a true American hero. He could solve any problem with his own wits.

We sat in the main meeting room for a white elephant gift party. Even though all the gifts were randomly selected, and most of them were deliberately awful, I immediately ranked which ones were the most desirable. The "ooohs" and "aahhhs" said it loudly. We leaned in to appreciate the good gifts, and we laughed when someone got stuck with a bad one.

Fifteen years ago, a freshman and I met every week at a hip coffee shop in Boston for a Bible study. We sat at a tiny round table with uneven legs in uncomfortable chairs, talking about our lives and the Bible. Nobody walking past us would have thought we were doing anything important. It was a weird way to spend my twenties.