On Chicken Feed and Dancing

About a week ago, I had the opportunity to gather with a few other pastors in the district. The leader of the meeting (Steve Wright, Oak Lawn) pitched a few questions our way and I found the questions to be both challenging and powerful. I’d like to deal with one of them on here today.

He shared about how when he grew up in Georgia, there used to be machines where you could put a nickel into the machine which did something to notify a real, live chicken to start dancing. The chickens would dance and then chicken feed when come out as a reward. You could just put nickels in over and over and watch this poor thing dance the day away.

I got a chuckle from this as I had never seen or heard of anything like this. But then Steve countered this story with a question for the group: What’s your chicken feed? What makes you dance? My gut reaction was to think about all the things that I SHOULD be dancing for. People coming to Jesus; seeing people grow in their walk with Jesus; seeing the Church become all it was meant to be…

But as we got deeper into the discussion, I realized that Steve was not really all that concerned with what I SHOULD be dancing for, as we all could pretty much agree on those sorts of things. What he was concerned about was to get us thinking about all the things that we were CURRENTLY dancing for… good or bad.

So my mind wandered to a whole different set of scenarios and I settled my mind on the fact that I tend to dance for the few out-spoken negative influences inside the church I serve at. And truthfully, I don’t dance for them personally… I dance for some semblance of peace. I have an aversion towards conflict, mostly because I find most of it unnecessary… but at the same time… I’m not sure anything I say or do would every really calm the spirit of someone who is overly critical.

But I just keep dancing anyway. I keep making certain decisions with the negatives in mind… even though most strategies and leadership principles I’ve heard or read make it clear that I need to ‘corral’ those sorts of influences in my mind and not let them shape who I am or the decisions I make. I’m still learning about conflict and compromise and confronting… I’m not very good at two of those three. But… much like any problem… it’s good to acknowledge the weakness first… to admit that I’m currently dancing for something unhealthy… both for me personally and the future of the church.

John 11.1-16

I recently made a commitment to read through the second half of the book of John with a friend. We are using N.T. Wright’s ‘For Everyone’ series as a guide. The idea is to deal with a chapter or so each time we meet together. I’ve been excited about it. This week has been my first week to engage with this portion of the scriptures and the material. It has been a blessing. I thought I’d put a few of my cursory thoughts up on here.

John 11.1-16

We are starting with John 11. It’s the story of the death and raising of Lazarus. This story has always been intriguing to me from the standpoint that Lazarus was one of the few people to have to die twice. Poor guy. But aside from that, it’s a marvelous foreshadowing of Jesus’ own resurrection. It really fits perfectly within the book of John.

One of the more dramatic elements of the first 16 verses of this chapter is Jesus’ IN-action. He learns about Lazarus’ plight, but doesn’t leave right away to ‘save the day.’ As N.T. Wright puts it… it’s a reminder that ‘his timing is not our timing.’ It’s actually something I’ve been working through in my own life recently.

I started working at my current church in 2007. It was my first ever Lead pastor position… so there was (and continues to be) a lot of on the fly, on the job learning. It seems that there was the expectation that this church would just start to take off because of my arrival. Truth be told, I was hoping this church would take off as well.

Four years later, and we are just now starting to get some traction. We are just now starting to see some things pay off. And it’s not huge gains yet, we are up about 5% from where we were last year. Last year was the worst, though. We ended up taking the first attendance loss since I’ve been here. It was really discouraging and led me to ask some unhealthy questions. Maybe I’m not the right one for this position. Maybe this church needs a different type of leader. Maybe I can’t grow a church.

I heard a sermon recently where the preacher made the comment: ‘Everything in the middle can seem like failure.’ It was a moving reminder to me that it’s easy to get discouraged in the middle of the story. I’ve found that it’s easy for people in churches to get discouraged in the middle of the story. That sometimes we need to wait for God’s perfect timing. Sometimes it seems like he arrived too late. But that would be because our vision is blurred or insufficient.

This passage urged me to trust in God’s timing. Not my own. Not in someone else’s timing. God’s timing. This passage also served as a reminder to continue to trust in Him with the ‘middle of my story.’ In those times when everything looks like failure… to continue to obey and trust that God will work and move in His own time and in His own way…