Put on a blindfold and walk in a straight line. Walk far enough and you’ll wind up going in circles.
Not just when walking. It can happen while swimming or driving. With a blindfold, in a fog, or in the dark. Whenever there’s no fixed and visible point on the horizon.
Scientific experiments have studied this phenomenon. (The driving tests were done in open fields, by the way.) A range of theories have been proposed – differences in leg length, a dominant eye, a tendency to favor right turns when confronting obstacles. No one really knows.
Except that it invariably happens. And always in clockwise circles.
Without external guides we inevitably get lost in very predictable patterns.
In eras past, sailors learned to navigate with great accuracy, using those most distant of objects – the stars. Of course, this only worked when you could see the stars. Until the compass was invented, people had to stay close to land – or on land that had defining features.
Although the Chinese invented the compass more than 2,000 years ago, it wasn’t used for navigation for another millennium. So, for much of human history, travelers depended on visible landmarks.
They followed a river or the coastline or a mountain range. They focused on a distant summit or a lone tree. Or they tracked the celestial beings – the sun, moon, and stars.
When I first moved to Taiwan in 1990, I had to navigate the dense streets of Taichung. Multistory buildings hemmed in crowded streets. All signs were in Chinese characters, as yet meaningless to me – characters, unlike letters, that could not be sounded out. To add to the confusion, many city blocks were laid out in triangular, not rectangular grids.
Downtown in this dense, unintelligible tangle of streets on a rainy day, I wanted to get home, which was in the opposite direction I was headed. Which would mean making two righthand turns, yes? Three righthand turns and I’d be back where I started, or so I reasoned.
But such reasoning failed me. I didn’t factor in Taichung’s odd-shaped blocks.
I got hopelessly lost. I couldn’t even ask for directions as I had only just begun language study. And all this, long before GPS and cell phones, certainly before I could read a map in Chinese.
Somehow, I found my way, exhausted by the time I got home.
Several years before, I’d joined a team from David Wilkerson’s ministry doing outreach in San Francisco. One young guy on the team had never been outside his Ohio farm country. Though he was told to stay close, he wanted to go on his own (first sign of trouble). So the team leader told him, “Don’t leave the city block.” In other words, don’t cross a street and you won’t get lost. That advice works no matter the block’s shape.
And he was told to report back within a set amount of time.
He didn’t.
It took us hours to find him. We fanned out in every possible direction. What we hadn’t accounted for was that he would be so entranced by the tall buildings – taller than any he’d ever seen – that he would look up and not realize he’d crossed a street. How he didn’t get killed in traffic remained a mystery.
When he couldn’t find the check-in point on the block because he was now on a different block, he made more mistakes, crossing streets to find his way back. One panicky misstep led to another. We found him blocks away from his check-in point sitting on a bench looking up at the tall buildings.
Again, no GPS, no cell phone, no map. No street sense.
I’ve been thinking about this proclivity for getting off-track as I’ve been reading books and research papers on various church and missions movements. How easy it is for churches and church movements to get sidetracked. The same is true of nonprofit organizations, schools, businesses, individuals – all get off course if they don’t deliberately take steps to keep from doing so.
No one sets out to get lost. I didn’t say to myself in Taiwan, “Self, let’s get lost today.”
Getting lost doesn’t necessarily happen in dramatic shifts either. The farm boy in San Francisco didn’t decide to cross the street; he just didn’t look ahead.
We get off-track one tiny misstep at a time when we don’t prioritize course correction, when we forget to pay attention to our surroundings. “Hmmm, they told me not to cross a street and I just did…”
After my wife and I moved to our current city, I made it top priority to find a church I could really plug into. Finding the right church home was a task I didn’t take lightly.
Asking the Spirit to guide, I investigated several churches within a certain distance of our new home. I reviewed their websites, checked available references, visited each one, and planned to revisit stronger prospects until one stood out.
Although church websites often obscure a multitude of sins, they can still be helpful. They tell us a lot about how a church communicates – in our modern times, with people in the community. I wanted to know how these church options lined up theologically, whether they were committed to both declaring and demonstrating the Good News, how they identified beyond themselves for accountability and mission fulfillment, and what their leadership looked like.
But churches are much more than digital identities. Any can talk a big talk online. But as savvy digital operators do not necessarily equate with quality spiritual leaders, do they really walk the walk?
How did I feel when I entered that church for the first time? Did people engage naturally and warmly with me? How did they worship? How was the Word presented? A lot more makes up a church and deeper dives take time, but first impressions can be helpful.
That said, I’ve been disappointed before. I’ve been impressed with churches initially only to watch them meander in circles. Sometimes change is abrupt as scandal bursts forth. More often the unwanted shift is a nearly imperceptible drift from the path originally set out. I would argue that even scandal-driven changes begin with the tiniest of drifts.
People don’t set out to make a big mess. They take a misstep here and a misstep there until they land in a big pile of yuck.
I’m deliberately not addressing specific churches or movements by name because I don’t want this conversation to be about them. But I am reading several books on large movements in our time that have landed in places different than where they started.
That said, getting to a destination different than your starting point is to be expected. Faith, like life, is a journey. Naturally we are going to wind up in a different place than where we began. Jesus said as much to his first disciples. Start in Jerusalem, then go to Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. Your journey won’t end until you’ve reached the whole world.
So, we are going to land in a different place than we started. A faith that doesn’t grow is not faith. As Paul puts it, When I was a child, I thought, talked, and acted like a child. When I became an adult, I put those childhood ways behind me. (1 Corinthians 13:11)
The question is not whether we are in a different place, but are we where we intended to get to?
As I am reading these books and doing additional research, I’m wanting to understand three things about these groups and movements.
- Is where they are now different from where they intended to go?
- If so, what missteps did they take that got them off-track?
- And why?
But there is something else I want to factor in. Isn’t it possible to set out for a destination and realize you need to head in a different direction than you first intended?
When the Apostle Paul was traveling through modern-day Turkey, he was heading for the province of Asia. Until he sensed he needed to make a course correction and instead set out for Macedonia. Acts 16:6-10 explains why he made the course correction, one that was mission driven.
Years ago, my family and I were traveling east to visit relatives for Thanksgiving when we got word that the daughter of close friends had died suddenly. Immediately, we turned around and headed back west. We wanted to be present with these loved ones in their time of need. Deliberate course correction is not in and of itself wrong.
Previously I’d lived in a city where a pastor had had great success growing what in those days was considered a large church. At a ministers’ gathering, he commented that, having grown his church, his next goal was to turn that church into a missions church. In other words, he was going to get his people involved in supporting missionaries and missions projects around the world, something they’d never done before.
Noble of him. But he failed. Although it was a much-needed course correction, it was too late. It wasn’t in his – or their – DNA. Eventually the church stagnated and withered.
Deliberate course correction works at times and other times not. And what about those times when the corrected course we take is wrong? Whether deliberate or unintended misstep, we wind up far from where we should be.
In my reading and research on these church movements, I’m asking when course correction is made:
- Is the change based on deliberate and careful re-evaluation of their goals in this journey of faith?
- Does something inherent in their faith call them to this action?
- Is this change mission fulfillment, mission creep, or mission abort?
Choosing the right target and staying on course, while not easy, is essential.
Back in the early 80s, I was running an operation called Campus 80s as part of a national campus ministry called Chi Alpha. Dennis Gaylor, the ministry’s national director, and I sensed Chi Alpha needed to develop a clear national vision, one that incorporated values inherent in the ministry in a two-fold call to excellence and expansion.
Everyone was for growth, but growth without being defined by excellence was destined for disaster. The excellence was to be thoroughly rooted in the philosophy and theology of Chi Alpha and also in solid affiliation and mutual accountability. Moreover, the expansion wasn’t just about numbers but about incorporating “new organizational wineskins” to accommodate growth. Over the next few decades, Dennis and his team took that national ministry to amazing heights.1
Meanwhile, not many years after that visioning, I did a personal course correction and headed to Asia. Which in hindsight was less course correction than mission fulfillment.
When is course correction right on track and when is it a misstep? When are the changes we make signs of growing up or signs of growing weird? How do we ensure we get where we really are supposed to be?
Over the next few months, I’ll be posting more reflections from my study in these contemporary churches and movements. I want to glean insights into how we as people of faith can stay on track even as we journey into unknown territory. This much I know, God calls us into the unknown, but not without navigational tools.
Lately I’ve been doing some “gig” work, providing interim leadership in local nonprofits. As my current gig winds down, I’m ready for new coaching assignments. As before, I’m offering my leadership coaching skills to people wanting a guide as they process new chapters in their lives. If you could use a coach right now, check out Looking for a Coach.
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- See Dennis Gaylor, Growing a Student Movement: The Development of Chi Alpha Campus Ministries 1940-2020 (2021), p. 105. ↩︎
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