By Amy Butler
I’ve never been especially good at doing puzzle-like activities. In fact, I don’t like them one bit. For example, I’ve never understood the attraction of those puzzle books kids take on long car rides. I don’t get the current Sudoku craze. And I could care less that doing crossword puzzles will protect against dementia. I’d rather be doing most anything other than a puzzle.
I think the core of this intense dislike may be the fact that puzzles have absolutely correct answers, and to finish a puzzle successfully you have to come up with the exactly right answer in exactly the right place or the whole thing falls apart.
This is not my general approach to life. Being of the right-brained persuasion, I prefer to dream about indistinct possibilities, try new and unusual things and extend the boundaries of strict convention. I think life is more fun that way. It’s a good thing for me, then, that much of my experience of church work falls into these categories, and most days, thanks to the excellent work of the church administrator, nobody expects me to solve any puzzles.
But I’ve noticed my work is feeling more and more like solving a puzzle these days as we’ve been doing some serious thinking about church structure. Like many historic downtown churches, our church had its last heyday in the 1950s, during which time a huge church structure was required to run the business and the programs of the church.
There may be another heyday ahead of us, but for right now a 24-member board of ushers is a little excessive. We are now a much smaller group often staggering under the weight of a structure that doesn’t work so well for our work as a church anymore.
So, what should we do? Well, we should find another structure, of course. If we can find just the right structure we’ll be able to manage all of our business with the greatest of ease, practically eliminate any church conflict and meet our giving goals every single year, right?
And, so, the search has begun. An intrepid staff intern interviewed many congregation members to hear their opinions. We collected information from churches all over the country. Piles of books on structure and strategy have been consulted. We’ve been chipping away at this puzzle convinced that if we keep looking hard enough surely we’ll find the structure that will fix all the problems and make everything run smoothly once and for all.
What we’re doing is trying to solve a really big puzzle, and it seems that the more I look for the answer, the more convinced I become that there probably is not, in fact, a failsafe solution, a perfect answer, the missing piece. I think it may be a mistake to think about our search for structure like it’s a race to solve a puzzle.
That is because we are a church. A church is a diverse crazy quilt of all kinds of people. We’re trying to do things that are hard and life-changing, things that buck the system and challenge the status quo. We also follow a God whose Spirit blows whichever way it will, stirring up new possibilities and often pushing us to places we’ve never been before. How can a structure order or control such a thing as the Church of Jesus Christ?
The answer is: it can’t. No structure can solve the dis-ease that comes from engaging the work of God’s Spirit. While we long for predictability and organization, God is perpetually doing new and wonderful things that break the molds we’ve created.
There are church structures, of course, that will work — some better than others. And there are organizational approaches to community that seem like they will help us get done what needs to get done. But there is no structure that can organize, contain or control the work of God in the church. If we are serious about being the church in the world, then we cannot depend on a structure to make us successful.
What a relief to understand that this is not a puzzle after all.
I’m still coming to work these days with much of my mental energy consumed by issues of structure. But there is a freedom in the awareness that this is not a puzzle, that there is no absolutely right answer, and that the work of God will go on in our lives, in our community, in this world with whatever energy and organization we can muster.
So we gather all the pieces together and arrange them in the best way we know how, aware that God can see the big picture we cannot see, and God will lead us into whatever is next, whether we have all the puzzle pieces lined up exactly right or not.