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.