Entrepreneurism and the Failure Society

To succeed, you must fail.

It is almost a mantra now, an assumed truth of our scattered, struggling culture.  Our goal, and the highest value, is entrepreneurism.  Because entrepreneurs?  They are the great heroes of global capitalism, the ones worth emulating, the ones we all strive to be.  They have this amazing idea, this striking insight, one that changes the dynamic of a particular industry.  They win, and win big, and upon them are lavished fame and acclaim and billions.

And yes, this does happen.

To make this happen, we are told, you must be willing to fail.  Success does not come right away.  It comes after you fail, and you fail, and you fail, and then you fail again.  You must keep failing, until finally that magic moment occurs, the stars align, and you go viral, and you nail it.

Success means failure.

That's the goal, the ground of countless TED talks and gurupreneurial books and blog posts and seminars.  It's such a baseline value now that we do not even question it.  And without question, there is truth in it.  I know this, quite inescapably so, as a writer.  Writing, like all creative endeavor, is nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine parts failure, and one part success.  Or maybe a half-part.  I'll let you know when I find out.

Or, at least, the acclaim is.  The writing itself, the actual activity, is more often a joy.   It's inherently good.  The "getting your novel published and made into a major motion picture that wins an Oscar, at which time Jennifer Lawrence tearily thanks you for a book that like totally changed her life?"  That happens rather less often, to the point of being functionally never.

And even though I love to write, some of it ain't exactly Tolstoy.  There are plenty of blog posts that never see the light of day.  Oh, Lord, I'll say.  That's really lousy.  Delete, and out it goes.

So as we strive, we have come to accept failure as a necessary part of the creative endeavor.  If you do not risk failure, you cannot achieve.

This is all well and good.  It is a truth we accept.  And I do, too, up to a point.  Perseverence is a worthy value, as is patience.  A willingness to strive and risk is a necessary part of a vibrant existence.

But I wonder, in the way that I do about things, whether or not mixed into the reality being shaped by this saying is more darkness than we'd care to admit.  Every saying has its shadow, after all.

Because "To succeed, you must fail" can sound like a Zen koan.  It can also sound Orwellian.

If we have been taught that we must be willing to fail most of the time, in most of our efforts, then we will be more willing to look at a society in which most people are failing most of the time and shrug it off.  We will have our efforts crash and burn and be frustrated over and over again, and just assume that's the way it must be.

Of course I'm struggling, we say.  I'm failing, because I have to, because that's what entrepreneurs do.

Yet I can remember a time when it was not so.  I can remember working as a stock clerk in a little shop, and bringing home enough income so that my fiancé and I could pay the rent, eat out, and have some left over to save.  I did not "fail" at that.  I did not expect to.  Work did not involve endless struggle and failure.  It was work.  It paid the bills, and life wasn't flashy, but neither were we anxious.

If most of us are failing, then perhaps a failure-embracing society is a sign that we aren't doing it right.

Who does this saying serve?  If the world around us feels creative and joyous, it serves us well.  It teaches the value of work, and of patience, and of stick-to-itiveness in the face of inevitable adversity.  It reminds us not to be entitled.

But if most of us are failing, then this saying only serves the interests of those who hold power and wealth.

Church Growth, Presbyterian Style

The goal of every pastor, pretty much without exception these days, is to "grow your congregation."  We train and attend seminars and pray earnestly that the Good Lord will see to bless our efforts with an abundant harvest of eager new pledge uni...I mean, disciples of Jesus of Nazareth.   We talk about new buildings, and salivate over that great plump bunch of unchurched bipeds that seems to dangle ever beyond our reach, like we're Tantalus in Church Planting Hell.

Well, that's the case for pastors outside of the oldline churches, at least.  Y'all either have nice new buildings radiant with big screens and parking and a great honking mortgage, or you're renting and dreaming about it, or you're still flailing away with the same dozen folks in that Bible study/praise circle that was supposed to be a megachurch already, dagflabbit.  

In older churches, there is yearning for more folks, but less earnest entrepreneurial evangelism.  

And we Presbyterians, we're, well, older.  We've been around longer.  We move at our own pace, sonny.

Yesterday, I gave a group of local pastors a brief tour through my rumpled, comfortable, and well-worn church.  I showed them our warm little sanctuary, built in 1847, which is easily the smallest church building in our small town.  I walked them through the building containing my office and the classrooms.  That aging structure was built in 1827, and feels every one of those years. 

One of the pastors, the Baptist, noticed the glassed-in bookcase in my office.  "Wow," he said, perusing the ancient tomes.  "Look at this!  These are really, really old catechisms!"   I told him I'd been meaning to look at them, but the case appeared to be locked.

After they left, I decided to explore the case further.  I fiddled with the lock for a moment, then realized the bookshelf wasn't locked at all, but held closed with an interior clasp.  I gave it a bit of a tug, and the door opened.  The smell of dust and must was strong, but I began to peruse the objects within. 

They were, almost without exception, ancient.  There was a silver bell, undoubtedly used to bring a classroom or meeting to order, that still sounded a tone so bright and clear and sustained that I half expected to look around and find myself in Narnia.   Many were old hymnals from the first decade of the 20th century.  Many more were books that had once been part of a Sunday School, readers and stories and collections of lessons that little groups of children would have had to memorize and recite.

There was, as seen above, a neatly maintained roll book for the Poolesville Presbyterian Sunday School.  Lists showed the names of every child who'd attended school, and whether they'd completed their assignments, and whether or not they'd checked a book out of the library.  It covered the years 1883 through 1885.

At the top of the case, I found a book of Session minutes.  The Session, for if you're blissfully unaware of Presbyterianese, is the group of Elders who are charged with gettin' the work of the church done.   Our board, basically.  As I had a Session meeting coming up in the evening, what better time to peruse Session minutes?   I wiped the dust off off the cover, dust that had gathered over what had clearly been many years, and cracked open the book.

Inside, the minutes began with a record of a meeting of the Session of Poolesville Presbyterian Church on July 12, 1885.   It was written in ink, possibly with a quill, and was in a neatly angled handwritten cursive, precise and meticulous.  This clerk of session---that's the person charged with maintaining the records---really cared about his work.  

He chronicled the decisions of the church, the folks who were seeking to join, and the activities of the pastor, who barely missed a day, except when the weather was most severe or he was called to preach the Gospel elsewhere.   He noted, in a reflection section, that Poolesville Presbyterian Church was not prone to outbursts of the Spirit, as were so many others, or prone to manifesting charismatic gifts.  But they were nonetheless, he mused, doing just fine.  Sounds oddly familiar.

As I read, my curiosity was piqued.  If this was a Session book...of a Presbyterian Church...then it would have the statistical records and accounting.  It would tell me just how big my church was back then.  I flipped through to where that would be in a current book, and lo and behold, there it was.

Total membership of Poolesville Presbyterian Church, one hundred and twenty six years ago?  

Seventy One.

Our current membership lies at around eighty-four.

I guess that means we're growing, by, hmm, what is that, almost 20% every one hundred years.   

So we're on track to be a thousand member church by, hold on, let's do the extrapolation, the Year of Our Lord Thirty Four Hundred and Two.

All part of the plan, my friends.  All part of the plan.

New Things

As I sit in the pastor's office on a Saturday morning, things are typically silent in the church. The halls are empty. The classrooms sit cold and dormant. The sanctuary is still. The thrums and wheezes of our heating system and the staccato clacking of my Mac's chicklet keyboard are the usually the only sounds. It can feel like a hollow, empty shell of a building, a brittle egg with no yolk and no white.

Today, though, the church bustles and hums with life. One of the folks who is joining the church tomorrow had the vision and desire to restart a culture school for adoptive parents of Korean kids. Our church had hosted a similar program years ago, but it waned when the agency we worked with changed hands and lost interest. But one eager and entrepreneurial soul was enough to get it rolling again. The church gives her the space and our encouragement and our prayers, and suddenly, there's sound and laughter and footsteps here again. I had the pleasure of offering up words of welcome to the group on behalf of the church this morning, and it was a delightful thing.

For a small church, there are three things to carefully avoid when you start up a new thing.

First, we need to avoid viewing new things as a distraction or a threat to "how things are." Many fading churches are desperate to revitalize, but only understand revitalization as "doing what we've always done but with more people." That is the path of decay and death. Life means dynamism and change and openness to the new. Vibrant and successful churches both nurture and celebrate newness. They encourage the gifts and hopes and aspirations of every soul who gathers with them. I think we've got this one down. Folks here are willing to embrace change, and my little leadership cadre has made that an explicit part of our congregational vision.

Second, we need to avoid being physically territorial. Whenever there is change in the life of a church, sometimes folks bump up against other folks. We try to coordinate times and spaces, but sometimes..well..things get moved. Or a room isn't quite exactly the way you left it. Or someone chasing down a child forgets they left a half-consumed cup of coffee on your desk. Given our not-so-distant remove from other higher primates, it's easy for human beings to get all pissy about picayune stuff like this. I know I can be that way sometimes. But that petty material gracelessness can be a surprisingly impressive impediment to renewal. For little groups who are used to everything being theirs, the whispering and puckered-lip disapproval over their use of our space and place can hamstring efforts to welcome in new opportunities for joy. I think we do OK at this about two-thirds of the time. I commit to doing it better, and to lovingly kicking the butts of folks I see falling into this trap.

Third, and this one is the hardest, we need not to be grasping. As any new program comes into being, particularly ones that serve others, it's really really hard for churches not to seize hold of them like a panicked drowning person. Every person who comes SIMPLY MUST JOIN US! We need you here! Pleasepleasepleaseplease! In our desperation to be moving in the right direction, we view every new opportunity as something that should serve us.

This gets it exactly backwards. Every new opportunity is an opportunity for us to better serve others. I know we don't have much time, and things are tough. But we need not to grasp and cling and cry out and have our future drown with us as we claw it under with us. Be calm. Don't panic. Celebrate the moments as they come, and keep ourselves open to the moments of new possibility that will arrive.