Why Christians need to stop chasing quick wins

My first reaction to a recent good news story wasn’t admiration. It was suspicion. The river Mease had just won the River Restoration Centre’s UK River Prize. Over 13 long years, 111 farmers and volunteers had tested water, fenced off livestock and replanted river banks that hardly anyone saw and nobody photographed. 13 years of nothing to show on social media.

My honest, unfiltered thought wasn’t: That’s beautiful. It was: Who does that anymore?

This week, my wife and I were on a train platform, mid-conversation about something else, when I turned to her and asked if we should just get started on the idea we’d had to lead Christian retreats. It’s something I’ve been pondering for a while. I’d finished writing one of the four devotionals; the other three remain an idea in my head. I’ve spent months planning to start number two.

I’ve started more things than I have finished. I have called it vision, but  I am not sure it was.

Measuring success

The problem is the timeline. Try knowing, two years into raising a child, whether what you are pouring into them is landing or running straight through. You give a decade to a job you believe in and cannot point to a single thing that would not have happened without you. You get up early to pray for a year and the only thing you can measure is the alarm going off. The only thing you have is the decision to show up again. 

None of these things are not built to be checked. While many things around us have a dashboard, none of these do.

I have done this. I have picked the thing I could measure, the project short enough to produce a result, because results are what leaders bring to the table when they want to look like they’re moving.

And it isn’t just leaders. Whole congregations carry this. We want to be the church with something to announce. We see another church with a new thing running and we want it - not because we’ve prayed about it, but because they have it and we don’t. I have been trying to find someone who did the opposite.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s seminary was shut down. The Confessing Church, the movement he had given himself to, largely ignored him. The plot against Hitler that he was drawn into failed. He was arrested, held and executed three weeks before liberation. He did not get to see whether any of it mattered. He died inside the failure of it, with no sign that the ground was about to shift.

I do not know what he carried into that cell. I know the record stops there. I have been trying to find a smaller version of that.

We see another church with a new thing running and we want it, not because we’ve prayed about it, but because they have it and we don’t.

There is a discipleship group I am part of called Eccles. For the last ten months, we have stopped jumping between resources and ideas. Every two months, we take a practice from the way of Jesus and live with it. Same method. New practice. No novelty. No change of direction. Just the same slow pattern, repeated.

People are changing. Not dramatically. Not in ways that make good stories on a Sunday. But in the small, real ways that only time produces. I have watched someone sit with a practice they said wasn’t working for six weeks, and then quietly stop mentioning that it wasn’t working. I am learning something I did not expect to learn. That slow and long works in a way that fast and new does not.

I find myself imagining what could happen if we walked this road for 13 years. The river doesn’t care that nobody filmed the fencing.

I keep wondering what we have simply agreed to stop measuring in decades, because decades do not fit inside a plan. A child. A career. A life of prayer. Bonhoeffer never read the second half of his own story. He died before the ending arrived. He staked everything on a harvest he would not live to see.

I want to know what I am willing to give decades to. I have not worked that out yet. I am not sure I am supposed to, this soon.