Leading at an Unsustainable Pace

Leading a church can feel like running on a treadmill. You have to run faster and faster just to stay in the same place, and if you stop for a second, it feels like you’ll be flung off the back. The pace is relentless: What was considered going “above and beyond” yesterday is the new baseline expectation for today, and who knows what tomorrow’s standard will be?

• Andrew Root began his presentation at the Church Now Cafe by describing this phenomenon and how to address it in our churches. Root says the German word zeitkranheit, which can be translated as “time sickness,” is appropriate. The sickness of our time is nonstop acceleration, burnout, and persistent exhaustion — and the church is not immune.
• In a world that never seems to be able to find contentment, Root offers a helpful paradigm shift that church leaders may want to consider embracing. Below are some highlights from the first day of the Church Now Cafe’s sessions.

 Five Ways the church experiences “time sickness”

1. Technological acceleration

• We have more computing power in our pockets than NASA did when they put a man on the moon. Moore’s Law describes how micro processing power doubles (and gets cheaper) every 18 months. It’s amazing!
• Although technological progress has brought about tremendous good, it has also produced a nasty side effect. People expect things to move faster today than they did yesterday. When they do not, they get very angry. Many people bring this expectation with them to church.

2.  increased availability

• Technological acceleration has enabled us to have ever-increasing access to goods, services, and people. Today, we literally have the world at our fingertips, but we do not have the time to benefit from all the options. This can produce “analysis paralysis.”
• An even more pernicious consequence of increased availability is the expectation that people should be accessible 24/7. Many church leaders feel forced to be “always on,” even though the human body and soul was not created for this way of being.

3. Society’s “decay rate”

• Society’s norms (how we organize our social lives and communicate with one another) have always constantly changed, but the rate of that change has skyrocketed recently.
• The “decay rate” is the length of time it takes something to no longer feel like it is “of the present.” With memes coming and going on social media daily, keeping up with communication patterns is harder and harder. For church leaders, keeping up with what is effective and what is considered acceptable is more challenging than ever.

4. The goal of “smoothness”

• For companies to be profitable, they need to make change as accessible as possible to as many people as possible.
• This has led to an obsession with the “smoothness” of change. We edit out any rough edges — anything rugged or organic. But what happens when the church is real about how difficult true change can be?

5. The Acceleration of pace

• Companies offer products that promise to help us do more with less. For example, email promised to reduce the time it takes to communicate drastically. Sending messages to ten people used to take two hours, but now it can be done in 10 minutes! Just think of all the free time we should have!
• Obviously, the story did not end that way. We now send 100 pieces of correspondence in a day, and we take our email with us to our dinner tables and even on our vacations. The relentless pace of growing expectations means we have to run harder and faster just to stay in place.

These dynamics can crush churches and church leaders underneath their weight. However, Christianity has a beautiful answer to this in the Gospel of God’s grace, and the world desperately needs to hear this answer! I’ll have more on that next week, as we consider the cure for an unsustainable pace!