Accountability doesn’t work one-to-one. It needs a room

By the third meeting I knew what he was going to say. I asked him anyway. 

“Mentor your three, like Jesus did,” I was told. So I asked him. We agreed to meet and I’d keep him accountable. He decided he wanted to read the Bible every night after work. He turned up both times and both times he hadn’t done it. I pushed harder. He pulled back. So we talked about his job for 20 minutes and arranged to meet again. 

We never did. 

He wasn’t avoiding me. He wanted to have done the thing he kept failing to do, and I was the only structure he had. But once he hadn’t done the thing, our conversation had nowhere to go. The only person he could appeal to was me. The only person who could ask why I was pushing was him. 

And I wonder what my real reason was. It wasn’t what he needed. That much was obvious. Maybe I needed him to change so that I could be the reason he did.  

If that’s true, it worries me. 

The circle of control

I’ve stopped using the word accountability out loud. Enough people have been controlled by leaders who called it discipleship. Some left their churches over it. Some left the faith. Being wary of anyone who wants to know whether you did the thing you said you’d do is a reasonable position, and I wouldn’t argue with anyone who holds it. 

Except that what stops a leader from becoming controlling is being answerable to someone. That’s the same safeguard we walked away from because of what it did, and it’s the only thing that would have stopped what it did. 

So what’s left is the safe version, and I’ve spent years trying to build it.  

One-to-one, voluntary, no authority in it, two people meeting to keep each other going. It kept collapsing. One of them ran for five months. He texted to move a Tuesday. I said no problem, we’d sort a new date. Neither of us ever did. I asked other people to mentor someone the way I had. They ran out of energy faster than I did. 

The safe version has the same problem the unsafe one had. When it’s two of you, one person carries all of it. Whether it’s working. Whether to push this week or let it go. Whether the month had counted. With him, I was the only one deciding, and part of what I was deciding was how it made me look. 

A pair has no witnesses and no spare parts. One person unavailable becomes nothing at all. 

James tells the Church to confess to one another and pray for each other so that they may be healed. I’d always heard that as two people in a quiet room. He’s writing to a congregation, and the instruction is plural. 

Witnesses and spare parts

I’m part of a group that meets in a living room. Ten of us belong to it. Six is a good night. We say what we said we’d do and whether we did it, and the rest of the room listens and says what it’s been like for them. 

One of us hit a family crisis. Hospital visits. Sleepless nights.

A pair has no witnesses and no spare parts.

She came anyway, 20 minutes late and still in her coat. When it got round to her she said, “Honestly, I haven’t done anything about it. Haven’t even given it a moment’s thought.” 

Nobody moved the evening around her. The question went round the room the way it always does, and it went past her, and the rest of us answered it. She sat and listened. She did that for six weeks. 

Then one night she said, “Yesterday I sat for ten minutes and prayed.” 

Ten people can’t coerce someone the way one person can. They’d have to agree with each other, and they don’t. 

I don’t know what happened to the man who wanted to read his Bible in the evenings. We stopped meeting. Nobody decided to. I never did ask. 

If I saw him now, I wouldn’t ask whether he’d done it. I’d ask who else knows he’s trying.