The Rev. Dr. Jason Byassee: Saturday morning Convention address

You’ll notice I don’t really trust abstract principles. I’m not into giving guidelines: here, do this, there, do that. Because what works in one place won’t work in another. So I go to specific places: the north of England, for example - notice what’s working there, and then tell you the stories, so you can take away from that particularity what might work in your particularity.

I do have one principle though. It’s not abstract. It comes from these stories with real people. Try something. Experiment. Fail. Learn. Try again. An evangelical sociologist told me once this is the difference between how the mainline and evangelicals endeavor things. Evangelicals try 100 things. They underfund all of them. They notice the 10 that succeed. Then they fund those. Three to four of those succeed long term, so the success rate overall is pretty low - 3-4%. But because they didn’t pour money in at the beginning, they spend it wisely. Meanwhile, we mainline liberals try one new thing. We lavishly fund it. Then when it fails, we say ‘oh well that never works, we can never try anything like that again.’ Or we try something, it sort of works, it’s kind of good, it limps along unchanged for years. No. Try lots of things. When they fail, call it an interesting failure, learn from it, and kill it. Then start ten more things. Or 100. You get my point?

Our professionalism in the mainline might have hurt us here. It’s really, really, expensive to hire a full-time clergy person. We have seminary costs, we need master’s degrees, years and years of vetting, pensions, over-priced health insurance. But if you start something, lay people are much cheaper. Pay them a little and it’s a lot to them. It’s not their day job. They’re doing it more out of love than for money (always a good thing in ministry). I told a friend in the UK about a new church plant, Alpha style, lots of guitars and lights, and they’d hired 5 full-time clergy to start. He shook his head. Did the math. And said “I could start 50 Fresh Expressions with that money.” Most of those 50 will fail. 10 will succeed. And those will be strong new cells of church life.

Churches are really good at sustaining: staunching decline, stretching out resources, selling off bits of ourselves. We do things that are kind of good. After surviving Covid we’ll keep zoom ministries going with little thought to whether they’re bearing fruit. But we need to experiment, to try stuff, and also to fail faster. If something’s not working do something else, take those resources and redeploy them. My co-author on Eight Virtues, Matt Miofsky, says churches are aware of the risk of doing stuff. We’ve tried that, it didn’t work, it hurt, it was embarrassing. We’re less aware of the risk of doing nothing. But there is risk there too. Missed opportunity. Insurance adjustors and risk students are trying to put dollar figures to the risk of doing nothing, it’s a growing field. I’d love to see this beautiful church in this gorgeous part of the world spend its capital not on extending life for its own sake, but birthing something new, that might look very different. That’s what church planters teach us: growth is a little unpredictable. You throw seed here and fruit comes up there. Wow, ok, weird, lets invest more there. But here’s what we can’t do. Save seed. Preserve it. Keep it “safe.” Nah, throw it everywhere, and see what the Lord of the harvest might birth.

So that’s my charge to you all. Start something. And maybe not just one thing. But lots of things. Find your folks whom others are attracted to and put them in a place they can invite their friends to pursue Jesus together. And count it as a success when there’s failure. Tell them to expect to fail. It takes the pressure off. As Christians the heart of our faith is a failure. The cross means life for all. Failure isn’t failure with our God. Success isn’t success without failure. Up is down, down is up. Mass chaos and hysteria. Or as we call it, resurrection.