Canadian Mennonite's blog

A long time ago, a strug­gling Team Canada turned to Bobby Orr to guide them to inter­na­tional glory. In those days his knees were so bad that hey were wrapped in ice more often than they weren’t. Today, if a pro ath­lete had knees like his, they would get arthro­scopic surgery in the off-season, and he’d be good as new when the puck dropped again in the fall. Even though Bobby’s sup­port­ing cast was weak, and their oppo­si­tion was strong, he put them on his shoul­ders and car­ried them to victory.

These days another fledg­ling squad has called on #4 to give them a boost. Mr. Orr can now be reg­u­larly seen on Chevro­let com­mer­cials endors­ing their most recent line of auto­mo­biles. It’s no secret that Gen­eral Motors is in trou­ble; their vehi­cles seem to be falling behind their com­pe­ti­tion in terms of per­for­mance and effi­ciency stan­dards, and finan­cially, they’ve been in the red so deep for so long that they needed mas­sive gov­ern­ment bailouts just to stay afloat. The for­mer defense­man even made ref­er­ence to this in the com­mer­cial when he asserts that “They are def­i­nitely back in the game.” Is GM admit­ting that for a cer­tain amount of time that they were out of the game? It seems to be an unchar­ac­ter­is­tic show of weakness.

But before he makes this bold asser­tion, Bobby quoted some­thing else that I was much more inter­ested in. It looked as though he was refer­ring to a new vehi­cle pro­duc­tion mantra: “Build them the best, or don’t build them at all.” I won­der if that’s just a catchy one-liner that their mar­ket­ing depart­ment came up with or if it is some­thing they are directly hear­ing from their cus­tomers. It seems to me that even if GM con­sis­tently tests lower than their major com­pe­ti­tion in per­for­mance and effi­ciency, they will con­tinue to make auto­mo­biles, no mat­ter how prin­ci­pled their man­age­ment is. How­ever, rank­ings aside, if sales num­bers don’t pick up in time to sta­bi­lize their long­time finan­cial pic­ture, they will be forced to shut down pro­duc­tion and this mantra will become true in a whole dif­fer­ent way than they were intend­ing.
This mantra could eas­ily be mis­taken as a mis­sion state­ment, but the inclu­sion of the word “or” (and the implied “or else”) makes it par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing. I’ve seen a tonne of mis­sion state­ments of churches and var­i­ous Chris­t­ian char­i­ties and I can’t remem­ber any that included this kind of “or else” con­clu­sion, but it does present some inter­est­ing possibilities.

Con­sider the Chris­t­ian Peace­maker Teams. They owe much of their found­ing to an “or else” kind of speech by Ron Sider. Could they use some of those same words to form a mis­sion statement?

“Ready to die devel­op­ing new non­vi­o­lent attempts to reduce inter­na­tional con­flict, or else we never really meant the cross was an alter­na­tive to the sword.”

Men­non­ite Church Canada’s mantra is also void of any “or else”‘s. I think the mean­ing becomes a lit­tle more urgent if we add some, even if the or else that I add is already implied.

“Form­ing a peo­ple of God … or else when we gather we’ll think we’ve already arrived.
Becom­ing a global church … or else we’ll assume ours is the only way to do things and we’ll for­get that Jesus came for the whole world, not just us.
Grow­ing lead­ers … or else the busi­ness of doing church will scare off any­one who might oth­er­wise want to lead.”

It’s maybe a bit wordy, but I think it leaves a nice touch.

What about indi­vid­ual con­gre­ga­tions though? They have their own mis­sion state­ments too, some­times dis­played as promi­nently as any scrip­ture verse. But if we add an or else to those state­ments, what tone should it take? We could take a prac­ti­cal slant and say “or else peo­ple will stop com­ing” or “or else our funds will dry up”. It might also be appro­pri­ate to take a spir­i­tual slant and say “or else we aren’t pay­ing close enough atten­tion to our pas­tor” or “or else the Spirit isn’t in us”. Or how about some­thing that com­bines them both?

“Liv­ing out our faith and bring­ing good news to our neigh­bours, here and around the world …
or else we have no right to gather as a church and should board up our doors and walk away.”

That might take up too many of those move­able let­ters on church signs though.

I’m not really that artic­u­late in per­son.  I man­age to fool a lot of peo­ple because usu­ally when they are lis­ten­ing the most atten­tively, I’ve had a chance to write things down ahead of time.  I nor­mally only make sense when I’ve first sat down to edit and rearrange my oth­er­wise gar­bled thoughts.

I was worse as a teenager, more so in the pres­ence of pretty girls. When I wanted to be clever, I sounded weird.  What I wanted to be charm­ing, I was just awk­ward.  Then, as if I wasn’t doing a good enough job mak­ing myself look bad, when we would gather as a group of friends to watch movies, the guys on the screen, who were already sig­nif­i­cantly bet­ter look­ing than me, deliv­ered lines that made them sound clever, charm­ing and sensitive.

Now, as an adult I find myself still stum­bling on sim­i­lar inse­cu­ri­ties.  It should come as no sur­prise to you that I am inter­ested in the­ol­ogy and spir­i­tual mat­ters, and I hope to some­how earn at least part of my liv­ing in this field.  So, to sati­ate my inter­est I read books, I lis­ten to radio pro­grams and I attend sem­i­nars, etc.  In part also do this to see what the com­pe­ti­tion is doing.  It can be dis­heart­en­ing to see just how com­posed, con­fi­dent and artic­u­late they are, at least com­pared to me.

As for those roman­tic movies, the older and more mature I get and the more real life I live, the less cred­i­ble they become.  Nat­u­rally they are intended to be mind­less fun and an escape from real­ity, but numer­ous stud­ies show that they do in fact impact our per­cep­tions of what can and should hap­pen with regards to love.  If our expec­ta­tions in this area are affected, even a lit­tle bit, it can seri­ously impact our hap­pi­ness.  For­tu­nately, since that time, most of those girls have real­ized that they didn’t in fact want one of those kinds of guys and have set­tled for real guys.  Unfor­tu­nately, it was right around that time I had actu­ally made some strides towards becom­ing one of those types of guys.

When I see reli­gious pro­fes­sion­als doing well at their jobs, that should push me to become bet­ter myself or to get out of the busi­ness alto­gether.  But there are a few reas­sur­ing points I’ve learned.  When I lis­ten to a radio inter­view, it always sounds like the host is com­ing up with tough ques­tions off the top of her head as the con­ver­sa­tion goes on, and the expert guest is imme­di­ately giv­ing well thought out answers off the top of his head as well.  What isn’t obvi­ous though is that the host, with care­ful study and prepa­ra­tion, writes out those ques­tions weeks in advance and gives them to the guest ahead of time so that he has time to com­pile answers that he is sat­is­fied with.  Then, the two of them act as though their dis­cus­sion is a smooth and free-flowing con­ver­sa­tion, when in fact it is just as scripted as the romance movies I once watched so uncom­fort­ably.  It’s a win-win arrange­ment for them, since they both come out sound­ing artic­u­late and intel­li­gent, and the radio pro­gram is more inter­est­ing as a result.  If they are suc­cess­ful, I will run out to buy the author’s book, and I will con­tinue to lis­ten to the radio program.

Besides my pro­fes­sional inse­cu­ri­ties, lots of peo­ple (lay­folk and clergy alike) strug­gle in a sim­i­lar way with their own spir­i­tual con­vic­tions.  But in the same way that a boy­ish Leonardo di Caprio can alter one’s idea of true romance, a phe­nom­e­non that I call ‘sound bite spir­i­tu­al­ity’ can alter how we feel about our own reli­gious self-understanding.  Peo­ple are drawn to experts and pub­lic fig­ures with short, catchy and sim­ple answers to life’s pro­found spir­i­tual ques­tions.  But these ques­tions are ones that the human race have been strug­gling with since the begin­ning of time.  It’s wrong for the church to claim sole own­er­ship of the answers to these ques­tions but an overly sim­ple answer also insults any­one strug­gling with that ques­tion now, and any­one who’s strug­gled with them in cen­turies past.  What is it about our age that we are sud­denly able to solve these mys­ter­ies?  What was wrong with those who went before us, and why couldn’t they see the answer as clearly as we now do thanks to the old man with the British accent on the stereo?

The Chris­t­ian faith is a jour­ney.  Along that jour­ney it is nat­ural to face both hills and val­leys.  The hard­ships that we face don’t mean that we don’t belong on the jour­ney or that oth­ers are jour­ney­ing bet­ter than us.  We are allowed to strug­gle on our Jesus jour­ney.  Imme­di­ately sim­ple sound­ing solu­tions to our strug­gles should not be met with our shame or frus­tra­tion at not hav­ing been able to see the answer sooner, but rather with sus­pi­cion at why this per­son is speak­ing with such con­fi­dence when so many for so long have struggled.