Is Success The Mortal Enemy Of Future Success?

 

I was up early this morning.

Today I'm meeting with an old friend of mine to discuss the revitalization of the rapidly declining United Methodist Church in America. Neither of us wants to see the current trend continue. (The UMC is getting older: of more than 46,000 UMC clergy in America, fewer than 850 are under the age of 35.  The UMC is getting smaller: two years ago attendance declined by 55,000; last year it declined by another 73,323.  The UMC is becoming less evangelistic: from 2001 to 2007 the number of professions-of-faith dropped by 18% and the number of confirmands declined by 21%.) 

In preparation for a solution-oriented and positive discussion, I was thinking about the challenges faced in dealing with an entrenched bureaucracy. I started wondering if that old line, "Success is the enemy of future success," was true. Why do bureaucrats so often behave as if they're deaf to innovations on their business model?  (And how inclined am I to do the same?)

Maybe past successes challenge future success, but isn't it also true that past successes give you a foundation of experience and skills often demanded by future success?  Isn't it also true that past success often positions you for future success? And isn't it true past victories often inform future strategies? 

I'm aware that success tends to make people hard of hearing, and the more success you've known in the past, the worse your hearing can become in the present. However, I'm also convinced visionary leaders can inspire innovation and growth that capitalizes on past successes, and in so doing, they can revitalize a very mature bureaucratic organization so it becomes relevant, valuable and vital again.

Here's to the notion of hope....

Hebrews 6:18-19  -  We who have run for our very lives to God have every reason to grab the promised hope with both hands and never let go. It's an unbreakable spiritual lifeline, reaching past all appearances right to the very presence of God where Jesus, running on ahead of us, has taken up his permanent post as high priest for us...

Comments

[James Kytta]

Mark 2:21-22 "And no one sews a patch of new cloth on an old garment, else it takes away from its fullness, the new from the old, and a worse tear occurs. No one puts new wine into old wineskins, else the new wine bursts the wineskins, and the wine spills, and the wineskins will be ruined. The new wine must be put into new wineskins."

[James Whatley]

People often overlook the closing verse of the "New Wine passage in Luke."

And no one after drinking old wine desires new, for he says, ‘The old is good.’”

Luke 5:39

I agree Mark the great inhibiter of future innovation is past success.

[David McEntire]

The issue,wether it is Israel, the Christian church, any denomination, or individual church has always been a spiritual one. The less intimacy with God the less effectiveness at the core. You can't preach the love of God unless you are in love with God. Apart from that it is simply "motion wihtout direction".

[Dr. James R. Jones, Jr.]

In the case of the UMC I think it is true. I am a third generation Methodist and the first in my family to become a UMC clergy. I married an outstanding woman who is a college professor and very gifted in her field. Upon graduating from a Ph.D. program, we moved to another conference. Now, after nearly fifteen years of experience in the ministry and leading churches that have grown (I also received my Doctor of Ministry degree and wrote a book about healthy churches), I was recently told that because I am not originally from this conference (we moved here for my wife's job) that I would have to completely start over in the appointment process just as if I had recently graduated from seminary. So, now after numerous conferences, incredible experiences, a pastor with incredible energy for leading may very well find himself in a small church that wants to go nowhere. The focus of the UMC system appears to be loyalty to a certain conference for a number of years rather than one's effectiveness in ministry. I see many complacent pastors in churches larger than I will receive soon simply because they decided to live and die in the state where they were born! I might as well go bury my talent in the sand or look elsewhere. That's how some of us in our forties feel about it. The past success of the UMC has blinded it from pursuing a more aggressive and radical approach to the future. As John Maxwell says, "everything rises and falls on leadership"; so, as long as pastoral leadership is measured by loyalty to a system rather than loyalty to God and effectiveness for the Kingdom of God, the church will continue to hemorrhage. How long will it take for our leadership to wake up? I love the church and do not want to leave but I also know that God will hold me accountable for how many people I brought to Christ and I now honestly wonder if I can do that more effectively outside rather than inside, of the UMC.