Moneyball and the Future of the Church, Part 1
Part 1. Think Differently
Moneyball, in case you haven’t seen it, is about baseball. But it’s also not about baseball. It’s about culture change. About how hard it is to change a culture, and about how it important it is to do just that, when the world around you has already changed.
And it’s just that mixture of hardboiled pragmatism about a changed world – in this case the world of baseball – and creative ingenuity to defy tradition in order to change that makes me think that the secret to the church’s future may lie in this very good movie
In brief, here’s the setup: Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane wants to change the way his team approaches baseball. Why? Because baseball has become an unfair game.
It used to be, you see, that the key to producing excellent teams was to recruit the best young players and develop them into future stars. Your prospects, that is, rested in your scouts and player development program. But then something happened: more revenue starting coming from televising your games than from ticket sales, and suddenly the larger the television market you played in the more money you had and, thanks to free agency, the better players you could buy.
Which is where Billy Beane comes in. Because the A’s are a small-market team (like my Twins!), he doesn’t command a payroll like teams from big-market areas like Boston or New York. So Beane decides that he and his team need to think differently, discarding the subjective criteria of the past and embracing a highly analytic approach to the game that discovers undervalued players who out perform their peers in terms of their ability to get on base.
It’s not a popular move. After all, the exemplary practices of baseball were long-standing, and the guardians of that tradition were not about to roll over to some upstart manager talking about a changed world.
The following clip gives a sense of the resistance Billy Beane faced: (warning, strong language at 1:38).
“What’s the problem?” Billy Beane keeps asking. To which his scouts reply that the problem is that they’ve lost their best players to richer teams. But as Beane says, that’s not the problem. The problem is that the world has changed but they haven’t. They’re still playing by the old rules. And so Beane urges them to abandon the cherished practices that may have worked once but were not suited to the current situation.
Sometimes I think we in the church engage in a similar conversation. What’s the problem, someone might ask. “People don’t go to church in the numbers they used to,” we answer. No, that’s not the problem. “People don’t give money to programs like they once did.” Nope, not that either. These are just symptoms. And as long as you think the problem is lower attendance or giving, than the only possible response is to do what we’ve always done, except do it better. So we preach the same as we always did, except now we use screens and PowerPoint. And so worship hasn’t really changed, but now we’ve thrown in a drum set. What we are doing is fundamentally the same, yet we somehow expect different results.
Why? Because the game we play has fundamentally changed, and until we face up to the fact that a lot of our most cherished practices were fashioned – indeed, perfected – in a world that is quickly vanishing, we will not see any different results.
The problem, in short, is that in a world of overwhelming obligations and opportunities where work knows no bounds and the culture no longer values going to church, our people need to be able to connect their faith to their daily lives themselves, not just come to church to have the pastor do it for them. That means we need to question the entire model of ministry where the pastor performs the faith each Sunday to the delight of an adoring and inspired audience. Rather, pastors need, to borrow biblical language, “to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ” (Ephesians 3:12-13).
In other words, we’ve got to think differently.
Next, Pt. 2: “Challenging Cherished Practices”
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love it when sports and religion mix, and you managed to mix my favorite sport here!
this is an amazing connection. i’m excited to see where you’ll go with this. my wheels are spinning on this one, and i’m not sure where i’m headed…
things could get exciting if we were willing to have this same attitude in our churches…
David,
A few years ago a pastor friend of mine was in the middle of a Worship meeting from The Hot Spot. The people (and pastors) were complaining that the services were too traditional and that former members were driving 45 minutes to go to a Vineyard Chuch. They wanted to know what my friend could do better.
I sent a note to him and said, “If people are driving 45 minutes to go to church, it’s not just about the music.”
I am looking forward to Part 2. I frequently hear rumination about decling attendance and giving. We have tried the video projectors and different bands. I feel we need to find a better way to to support vocation. Bill
I’ve been reading your posts for some time. Today I sat down with someone to talk about how to make our family Christmas eve service more participatory – how to tell the story of Christmas as an interactive dialogue and how to set the rest of the service in the midst of that dialogue. I’m not sure if it will work, but it feels like it’s time to try something completely different. Thank you for the continued inspiration to think differently and to stop asking the same questions. If you have thoughts about how to help a congregation “get” this (that is, the big picture need to rethink how we do ministry and worship), I’d love to hear them.
Thanks so much for your note, Sandra.
The other day in a preaching class I teach, one of the students shared an experience she had at the family Christmas Eve service in her congregation last year. They decided to make “blessing” one of the themes of the evening – God’s blessing of us in Jesus, the blessing of this child, the blessing of Christian community, the promise of peace on earth, etc. At the end of the service, they invited people to come up to receive a blessing at one of a half dozen stations (like communion) and then to bless each other (kind of like sharing the peace). She said it was incredibly powerful for people both to receive and to participate in extending God’s blessing to each other. I can imagine that linking that to the angels’ blessing of “peace on earth and goodwill to all” was powerful indeed. So there’s one small idea. 🙂 Have at it!
David, Martin Wells recommended this series as a possible study for the leadership of our congregations in the EWAID Synod at the January meeting of the Synod Council. As I consider the possibility, I am both excited and terrified. On one level, I feel as though we are trying to locate a root problem with wisdom, prayer, and discernment, but on another, I know that too many of my people are still trying to figure out, “Who’s Fabio?” To even begin to have the conversation will take significant energy, patience, and education. Thanks for getting me started.
Yes, we need to think differently. We are a kingdom of priests 4John to the seven churches that are in Asia: Grace to you and peace, from him who is and who was and who is to come; and from the seven Spirits that are before his throne; 5and from Jesus Christ, who is the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth. Unto him that loveth us, and loosed us from our sins by his blood; 6and he made us to be a kingdom, to be priests unto his God and Father; to him be the glory and the dominion for ever and ever. Amen.7Behold, he cometh with the clouds; and every eye shall see him, and they that pierced him; and all the tribes of the earth shall mourn over him. Even so, Amen. Revelation 1:4-7 ASV
We are called to do the work of ministry to the glory of God.