Crazy Calls and the Machines of Measurement

I'm old enough to remember when answering machines were new. I'm old enough to remember that at first they used tapes to record the messages, ingoing and outgoing. I'm old enough to remember commercials for funny outgoing message tapes. One of them was called "Crazy Calls," and I can still sing about 4 of the different outgoing message options on it. There was the Beethoven's 5th one ("Nobody's home...nobody's home"). There was the hip hop one ("You've gotta leave your name, you've gotta leave your number. Wait for the beep."). There was the Andrews sisters one ("Hey I'm very sorry, but I'm not at home, but when I get the message on the telephone you'll be the first one my our list").

I just got curious, so I googled it.  Sure enough...

And SUPER DUPER BONUS! If you want to record one of these on your voicemail, you can now find the entire Crazy Calls tape on youtube. It includes completely irrelevant instructions for how to get this on your answering machine, just in case you need them.

There's also a second volume, if you're interested. [Editor's note: The fact that this is available on Youtube feels like almost as big a waste of electrons as its existence in my head feels like a waste of neurons.  My first question to God: why don't we have a "purge" button for our brain?]

In his Mission Statement, Jerry Maguire (yeah, I'm still on that) talks about his dad, who started a phone answering business only to be put out of business by the answering machine. He points out that within three years answering machines were in everyone's home, but not until they figured out how to personalize them. No doubt he was thinking of Crazy Calls when he wrote that.

The Things We Think and Do Not Say: 

The machine was a part of life, but only when everyone learned to personalize it.

He goes on to talk about the way that sports had become a machine...that Sports would never be "the Pute and simple thing that older men pine for." He says everyone knows it.  Players, owners, fans. "The machine has moved into our homes." And he asks the question: "How do we personalize that machine?"

His argument is that his company has lost its passion in the interest of generating more money, entering into a cycle of attempting to maintain success. The entrance into that cycle itself leads to eventual failure as the life-giving passion wanes. He says that at their moment of greatest success, the great ones all do one thing: they raise the bar, working harder and smarter to raise the bar. It's that commitment to their passion that powers them to even greater heights.

I've been a part of churches in all different parts of their growth cycles. As I mentioned last week, I've seen the very end.  But I've also been there for what I still believe was a promising beginning. Not a new start as much as a rebirth. I was so proud to be a part of a congregation that use the memory of what was to empower the new rather than constrain it, understanding that future success rarely looks like past success.

Jerry's question is really about measuring success. Do we measure it by the number of clients and the number of dollars, or is there some other way to measure it...one that takes into account the passion that drove them to agency in the first place. He doesn't answer that question just yet.

I'm convinced "measuring success" is the root of all evil. It's not that we don't need to evaluate. We do. It's just that so often the measures of success become more important than what we are measuring. Do we care more about education or test scores? You desperately want to say "education," but that's simply not true. The overwhelming truth is that our society cares far more about test scores than it does education. That's why "teaching to the test" is a thing, and it's tragic.

I get it. Evaluating real success is HARD. Maybe impossible. Because subjective evaluation is messy, and objective evaluation is at best imprecise but more often worthless. You can tell me I'm crazy, and you may be right. I may be crazy. [Editor's note: but it just may be a lunatic you're looking for.] After all, if a company needs widgets packed, evaluating the widget packers by the number of widgets they can pack seems reasonable. But it ignores what makes someone a good widget packer in the first place: a passion for packing widgets.

So now I have a question. How do we measure the success of a church? Nearly every church leadership meeting I've attended where this comes up has wound up in the same place. They want metrics. Dollars in the plates and butts in the seats. More dollars? More better. Fewer butts in the seats? The director's in the hot seat. The result is that we, as a church, start chasing after numbers. I was guilty of this in my first full time music director job. I made it all about the numbers until my choir president very politely told me how off-putting it was and that I really needed to knock it off.

[Side note. That can lead to some really funny things. I once saw a worship counting form that had a space for the numbers as well as a space to note the weather and any other factors that may have depressed attendance. "Well, our attendance was down last week, but to be fair the temperature was 10 degrees below optimal, and there were scattered clouds which may have led people to believe rain was coming prior to the end of church." WHAT?! People will sleep overnight in front of a store to get a good price on a TV. Don't tell me what we're offering isn't important enough to put on a jacket.]

The thing is, numbers can be a symptom of success in church. If people find value in church, they might support it with their money and will share it with their friends like they share apple pie recipes (leading to better attendance). But they might not do those things. And Jesus didn't tell us to serve only people who will pay or will serve as our megaphone to the world.

I don't know the right answer to this question, or even if there is a right answer. Honestly I do pay attention to the numbers. But I'm very cautious not to strive for them. Every day, I try to build relationships with people and between people, connecting them with a family that offers both comfort and care when they need it as well as an opportunity to offer comfort and care to others.

Maybe the way to measure evaluate success in ministry is in terms of the journey we are on together. How many "miles" have we walked together? What have we done together that's worth anything? What has caused us to stumble along the way? How did we grow from it? How well did we put aside our differences--or better yet use them--to have a positive impact on the world?

How would you evaluate success in ministry?  Leave your answer in the comments.

The Shoes That Came With the Little Pump

Bad news.  I've still been reading Jerry Maguire's Mission Statement.  After the part that made me think about how we've maybe lost track of why we are the Church, he talks a lot about a guy named Dickey Fox. Dickey's story is inspiring in that he didn't allow his success in the world of sports agency to cloud his vision of what was really important: personal relationships.  If our "why" is to reveal God's unconditional love to the world, the "what" is personal relationships.

The Things We Think and Do Not Say: 

Or do we just want to be the guy who sold the guy who sold shoes that came with the little pump?

In the Bible, Jesus doesn't get angry all that often, but when he did, it was because people had taken to profiting in the Temple.  They made...it.....a.......business.  I sometimes wonder if we have done the same. Naturally, we aren't peddling changing money to help people purchase animals for sacrifice, but I'm not sure that absolves us of wrongdoing. I'll admit this conversation is deeply uncomfortable for me because I make a living working in the church. I sometimes wonder and worry about what words Jesus would have for me if he were to show up at my office door. Would he turn my desk over? Toss my computer out the window? 

During the golden age of churchgoing, when congregations exploded and buildings busted at the seams, what was driving all that growth?  The party line is that it was bringing people to faith, to Christ. And that is definitely true for some. I know a lot of people who came to faith during that time and for all the right reasons. They are the rocks on which the church is built and the reason I can sit at this desk and type these words.

But if we're saying things we think and do not say, I'd offer that for much of the 20th century (at least), church had become a place where people connected to their privilege rather than to Christ. Church attendance was expected, and because of that, it offered a convenient place to rub elbows with important people--a place to network.

Church had become a business opportunity. Church had become the guy who sold the guy who sold the shoes that came with the little pump rather than the guy who truly sought better for everyone in the world except for himself.

Somewhere along the way, someone realized there are other places to do that. Places that are a lot more fun that don't ask for 10% of your income on a regular basis. Attendance patterns changed. Giving changed. Steeples started to topple. Literally. 

I served that church almost 20 years ago. I once climbed into that steeple. Now it's a mixed use development with a mattress store across the street and a clever name. When I served there, the library included a few albums of church history. Not long before the church had been vibrant and full of life. The biggest problem was how to protect people as they walked across North Decatur Road because there wasn't adequate parking on the church's side of the street. By the time I arrived, though, those glory days were over. Somewhere in our heart, while we hoped the church would regain itself, I think we all knew this would happen. It was only a question of how long it would take.

Do you know why that church ultimately collapsed (apart from the cable attached to a bulldozer)? It's because personal relationships collapsed. Over a period of a decade or so, multiple splits occurred, and people left the church. If halved, and it halved again. People abandoned each other, not the building.  And at some point enough of the relationships died that the building went with them.  In fact, the relationships that lived moved down the street to meet at another church and rededicated the resources generated to serving the aging!

Sure, there are some "old school" churches that are still wildly successful. But the churches that are reborn from the ashes of the churches that have died seem to start with building relationships. They focus on being present for each other and working together to reveal God's love to the world.

Working in music ministry, it's easy to think the "what" of ministry is the music: the number of ensembles and the number of people in them, the kind of music we sing, and the quality of the music we sing. But all that is just shoes that came with a little pump. The "what" of music ministry is exactly what Dickey Fox told us was the secret to his job: personal relationships. Caring for each other and caring for each person we meet along the way. Sing with me...and you are family.

Jerry Maguire. Why? What? How?

Yesterday I was having lunch outside with some of the staff.  We were on a lunch break from a day-long staff retreat.  I brought up Jerry Maguire (a movie from the 90's because all I know is hopelessly dated movies like Jerry Maguire and Roadhouse).  When I said the words "Jerry Maguire," the staff responded just as you would expect: "Show me the money!"  "You complete me."  This is preferable to the reaction I would have received if I had mentioned the movie in youth choir.  The youth would have either stared blankly or perhaps asked, "Who's that?"  I have proof.  Last week I said something about the matrix, and none of them knew what I was talking about...or that they are living in it.

But that's not important right now.  This isn't a post about the matrix, so let's take the blue pill and get back to Jerry Maguire.

The movie opens with sports agent Jerry having an epiphany about his work.  He helped build a massive sports agency company but found himself lacking purpose in a world where he spent all his time wooing more and more clients to earn more and more dollars with no personal relationship to show for it.  His solution and proposed new direction for the company (written down in a mission statement that he distributed to the whole company) was to have fewer clients and invest more in their well-being.  He was, of course, fired immediately by one of the agents he trained who then also secures all the clients Jerry used to represent...except one, setting up the ultimate fulfillment of his mission statement.  [oops...retroactive spoiler alert!]

I was thinking about the opening sequence of the movie and about the importance of investing in personal relationships, which is why I looked up the opening of the movie.  I discovered something that blew my mind.  In the movie, all you get is a voiceover and some references to this "25 page mission statement" called "The Things We Think and Do Not Say."  But the writer of the movie, Cameron Crowe, actually wrote the entire mission statement even though it never appears in the movie.  So while I intended to spend about 5 minutes reading the introduction of the movie, I wound up spending more like 30 reading the mission statement (which, by the way, is actually only 14 pages).

There are two NSFW passages in the mission statement.  With that warning, if you'd like to read it, you can find the whole thing here if you're interested:

https://www.theuncool.com/2016/04/25/jerry-maguire-mission-statement/

Why did I read the whole thing?  It's because it resonated so deeply.  By the end of the first paragraph I began to feel uneasy.  "There's a cruel wind blowing through our business. We all feel it, and if we don't, perhaps we've forgotten how to feel. But here is the truth. We are less ourselves than we were when we started this organization."

I felt uneasy because when he said, "our business," I read, "our Church."  That's the big C Church.  All of it.  The whole thing.  Christianity in toto.

That was just the first of--I'm not sure how many--passages that sent my head spinning. I was just going to write one article referencing this, but it's rich and deep. There may be more than one article coming on this. I can't speak for anyone else, only myself.  It's certainly not an official position or statement. Like Jerry's original, it's just my own thoughts...using Jerry's thoughts as a catalyst.

The Things We Think and Do Not Say: 

We are less ourselves than we were when we started this organization.

I started in ministry with a kind of idealism of what it is.  At its core, ministry is service. I felt a call to that service, and I answered it.  But anyone who has served in any official capacity in any church can tell you that pragmatics can and do supersede ideals more often than we'd like to admit.  I was quickly dis-illusioned (which I don't mean in a negative way).  In my first years of ministry I saw that pragmatism is necessary in order for the church to live.  We have bills, and they have to be paid no matter how pretty the music is or how kind the people are.

The thing is, the "how" so frequently gets in the way of the "what" and, more importantly, the "why."  When I started out, I knew what I wanted to do and why I wanted to do it.  Any energy spent on the how takes me away from what and why.  I've been in meetings that were about nothing but how.  I've served with people who have spent so much time thinking about how that it seems like they've forgotten why entirely.  That's the sense in which we are less ourselves than when we started.

To be clear, how is a critical question.  It just needs to be held in check, balanced delicately with what and why (and not in equal parts!).

It's easy to get lost in the weeds of ministry.  Under the pressure of budgets and pandemic limitations and changing attitudes about church, it's easy to wonder how we can continue and to focus our energy there.  But we shift our focus to how at our own peril.  I have, from time to time, lost sight of why I do this: I feel strongly called by my faith to lift others up.  Each time I did, I was less myself than when I started.

The Church started as a movement to reveal God's universal love to the world--to love the unloved and the unlovable.  That is our why, and it matters more than the what and the how put together.

What Would You Say It Is You Do Here?

  Several weeks back in staff meeting, Dale asked us to write a summary of what it is we do here.  The idea is that if we get run over by a bus, someone reading the list should be able to more or less step in and fill our shoes until a permanent solution can be found.

What would you say it is...you do here?

        This can be somewhat challenging for a job like mine because the task list is fairly fluid from day to day and week to week.  I mean, there’s the obvious things like picking out music and directing choirs (actual music directing kinds of things), but that actually represents a pretty small slice of my task list pie.

The Music Ministry Pie

Over the last 17 or so years, I’ve discovered that “Church Music Director” actually includes a strikingly diverse set of non-musical responsibilities including but not limited to: logistics, writing, counseling, care and feeding, building maintenance, light design, set design, cooking, construction, painting, instrument repair, typesetting, publishing, technical support, taxi service, database design, web design, stage hand, event planning, packing and moving, dispute resolution, praying, preaching, and more.  And in the last year I added remote audio engineering and video production to the list as well as meteorology and sociology as we created online worship and tried to guess both the weather and the willingness of people to participate in outside activities on a given day.

Actual picture of me doing "music ministry."

It’s actually interesting to me how my role as a director of music has changed across the years based on the technology available.  Things are changing so fast.  When I started doing ministry, a full color print of anything required an act of congress, and it cost enough to fully fund the budgets of some small countries.  Unless you ordered 10,000 of them, in which case the cost per print was quite reasonable.  It’s just that you then had to use the 9,950 you had left over as scratch paper for the next 30 years.  I’m not kidding…I actually still have some paper left over from one such print job around here somewhere.  It was Café del Sol at Embry Hills.  I haven’t been there for almost 15 years.

On my first Youth Choir Tour, I took a road atlas to help navigate.  A few years later I was SUPER high tech because I used Mapquest (do you remember mapquest?) to print an overview and details of our route.  Today I just say, “Hey Google, navigate to Hampton Inn in Sedona, Arizona,” and I get turn-by-turn directions as well as a clever ETA that tells me I’m definitely going to be late.

If you had told me in 2005 that in 15 or so years we’d use our phones to record videos so we could all make music together from home because it wouldn’t be safe to be together, I’d have asked you what episode of Star Trek featured a choir (and how did I miss it).  Sure, some of the basic principles of how we do things are the same, but man alive the day to day tasks have evolved to the point you wouldn’t even recognize the job.

But I’ve also found the most important parts of the job really haven’t changed much at all.  One of my tasks is to care about people—in music ministry and out, inside the church and out.  It means I need to listen to them and try to help them in any way I can.  Honestly a lot of the time there’s not a lot I can do for them, but sometimes just sitting and listening is enough (and if it isn’t, I can set out to find someone who can help!).

Maybe the most important part of my job is building community.  In fact, that’s what my job really is.  You might have thought it was music, but music is really a tool of my community building trade.  I bring people together around a common goal. I encourage them to take on challenges and overcome them together.  I connect them with each other so that when life gets dicey they have each other.  And I do that for people of all ages, because you’re never too young or too old to need a group of people who care about you.

It’s hard to put that on a daily task list.  Maybe that’s why weeks after he asked us for these lists I still haven’t given him one.  Dale, if you’re reading this, I’m really trying to do what you asked!  I’m just not sure what to put on it because things I can put on the list are just physical manifestations of a much deeper purpose that by themselves seem kindof ridiculous.

Well, I’d better wrap this up.  The scale drawing of the new folder slots isn’t going to draw itself, and somehow I need to figure out how we’re going to hang lights in the sanctuary for the Christmas Concert, which is on December 11 and 12.  I’ll wait while you mark your calendar.