​What the World Cup can teach church leaders about measuring success

It’s hard to pin down the magic ingredients of a football game – it’s a combination of physical skill, mental resilience, chemistry among the team and a bit of luck on the day. Those moments on the pitch reflect thousands of hours of training, and a whole team of professionals supporting and positioning the players to do their best.

The pressure is real - on and off the pitch - to gain the favour of the coaches; there’s the anticipation of finding out whether you’re playing or starting on the bench, the unspoken sense of competition and jostling among the players and the expectation that you continue to show up and give it everything you’ve got, come what may.

When our sense of worth is tied to outcomes we can’t wholly control or predict, we can feel demoralised

But the pressure of the club game doesn’t compare with the pressure of representing your country on the world stage, knowing that people from home are staying up late to watch the match.

Winning or losing in the Premier League matters for about 24 hours, and then it’s back to work – taking the long view as another season of inevitable highs and lows begins. For players in the World Cup, the stakes are so much higher - especially when it comes down to penalties - and so is the pressure.

Identity and performance in football

On Facebook, Ballers in God gave a shout out to DR Congo’s Noah Sadiki, who wore a wristband that read: “I Belong to Jesus” and prayed before kick-off, with the clear message: “Win or lose, Jesus remains King.”

In his book, Inner Excellence, author Jim Murphy, talks about his experience as a professional baseball player, and how his fear of failure made him buckle under pressure. When he later coached athletes, he saw the same thing – players losing their joy in the game as the fear of failure and performance anxiety took over.

When we fuse our identity with our performance, it takes its toll on our sense of worth and intrinsic value. To counteract this, he says, we need to reframe our performance: starting from a place of gratitude and a mindset of abundance; being grateful for the moment and staying present, surrendering the outcomes in the knowledge that we’re ultimately part of something bigger.

Identity and performance in the Church

My parish is currently involved in writing a funding bid that will hopefully lead to investment from the national church. We’re doing our best to prepare well and aim for outcomes that we can’t accurately predict.

In Luke 14, Jesus speaks about counting the cost, of planning and strategy and making sure the projects we embark on can be completed: “For who would begin construction of a building without first calculating the cost to see if there is enough money to finish it?” (14:28, NLT).

And yet there is this tension. In my experience, the Kingdom of God doesn’t use metrics that we understand. Instead of measuring bums on seats, Jesus uses the language of fruitfulness and health. But when we’re preparing a funding bid, we can’t record ‘open hearts’ in our service records or quantify the significance of pastoral conversations.

We are what we do?

Pressure is everywhere, especially in public facing roles, and the truth is that the root of pressure, whether it’s on the pitch or in the pews, is often deeply rooted in the belief that we are what we do.

As clergy, when our sense of worth is tied to outcomes we can’t wholly control or predict, we can feel demoralised. We can lose our sense of gratitude and joy found in the privilege of being paid (well, sort of) to bring people together in communities of faith.

Increasingly, the most joy-filled moments of parish life are, for me, the spontaneous conversations that I hadn’t planned for but which feel surprisingly rich. At the end of a long day, they feed my soul, reminding me why I do this job.

Perhaps I too, need to shift my mindset from fear to adventure, holding less tightly to my own and others’ perception of ‘success’.

This is more than just positive thinking. It is the deep work of staring down our own demons, naming the fears that lurk in all of us and inevitably shape our behaviour.

Since there is a resistance among some in the church to anything that smells like management-speak and business values, perhaps we should lean into the wisdom of sports psychology instead taking the performance of some players at this World Cup as our example and inspiration.

Rather than making decisions based on anxiety and a fear of scarcity, what might it look like to reframe our purpose and mission. What might it look like to move from a fearful, survival mindset to a renewed confidence in the Holy Spirit’s ability to work in our nation?

Might this free us up as church leaders to simply enjoy Jesus again?

The Alternative Book of Discipleship by Sarah Guinness (Malcom Down Publishing) is available now