Adapt-Olympics

Photo by Owen Jenkins

Somewhere around my fifth birthday, my older brother and I received a Pitch-Back as a gift. It's a trampoline of sorts that sits at an upright angle. When a ball is thrown against the mesh netting, the recoil action bounces the ball back to the thrower. Woven into the center of the netting is a rectangular target, or strike zone.

Over a five or six year period, I honed my pitching skill and my imagination in our back yard. Stepping off the proper distance between the plate and mound for Little League, I spent countless afternoons striking out the likes of Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, and even Babe Ruth, in my mind. Though I didn't understand the science of it, my body’s pitching motion was developing muscle memory, which still allows me, to this day, to throw a baseball with considerable consistency.

Throughout my life, I've learned to throw many things with accuracy. It's a game my brother and I often played. We'd grab a dirty shirt or pair of socks from the floor, wad them into a "ball", step across the room, and see who could most accurately toss them into the hamper. We'd do the same thing, competing to see who could ring the trash can with crumpled paper, bottles, cans, and pretty much anything we could find.

I usually won. Of course, my brother is not around to contradict me, but it's true anyway; not because I was a superior athlete, but because I spent more than five years of my life in the back yard with the Pitch-Back. And because my brain seems to have a pretty good auto-calculation function that adjusts for things like weight, distance, and even drag/wind-resistance.

What difference does this make? Unless the International Olympic Committee decides to create an adaptability event, where athletes toss random objects from varying distances into a variety of goals and cups, this particular skill seems to be superfluous. But it's not.

Okay, the physical skill itself probably has extremely limited application. But the concept translates well into organizational leadership, especially in the church. Though the church you serve and call home may not overzealously embrace a "We've always done it this way!" vision for the future, such an approach is a common and comfortable mode in institutional religion.

To quote an old hymn, many denominations and congregations rally 'round the cry, "It was good for Paul and Silas, and it's good enough for me." without realizing that Paul and Silas practiced the gospel in ways that were specific to their culture and context, neither of which are similar to twenty-first century USA.

Changes in technology and culture are both accelerating and unsettling. In order for the church to remain faithful and relevant, a balance between tradition and adaptation must be maintained. Here are some of the key questions we need to ask:

• What are the core components of our faith?
• How do we practice these?
• Why do we practice these?
• How can we best convey these first three answers to the current generation?
• With respect to the gospel, what's the difference between the method and the message?

I believe a solid grounding in our faith practices is what provides us with spiritual muscle memory to effectively proclaim the message, and an openness to flexibility and creativity will allow us to adapt the method so that it reaches people in our current culture.

Let the conversation begin, or continue, whichever the case may be!

© 2015 Todd Jenkins