Your New Mission Statement: Try Less Hard?

In a recent post, author and pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber (NBZ) writes, “My favorite thing I ever heard in a yoga class was, ‘Try less hard.’”

Trying harder may be a birth-order thing. I was my parents’ first, an “oldest.” Oldest and male. And of a generation of Americans who really, truly believed (and not without reason) in “Try Harder” and, as Avis ads proclaimed, “We Try Harder.” My dear mother would sometimes say to me, “You go at everything like you’re killing snakes.”

So, “try less hard”? I love that advice; more than that, I need it. I’m guessing that maybe I’m not alone in this. Perhaps you too internalized the message somewhere along the way that “try harder” was the one-size-fits-all, go-to solution for any problem, challenge, or obstacle in life.

There is, of course, some truth to “try harder” — but only some. Life is full of paradoxes, stuff that doesn’t make sense but is nonetheless true. One of the paradoxes is that sometimes trying super hard can really mess things up, while trying a little less hard can create a space in which good things happen that we never saw coming or would have never imagined on our own.

NBZ’s “try less hard” is part of her essay on “mission statements.” Somewhere along the line in the last 30 to 40 years nearly everyone — businesses, churches, police departments, NGO’s, school systems, and individuals — got on board with the idea that you’ve got to have a mission or vision statement. I confess I drank that Kool-Aid and likely urged way too many churches to get a mission statement.

But after a while I noticed two things. One was coming up with the mission statement took a tremendous amount of time and energy. And after a church had one, it seldom made a bit of difference. Over time I concluded that a sense of mission or sense of purpose, especially on the part of congregation’s leadership, is the important thing. But expending lots of staff and volunteer hours and many meeting on coming up with “the mission statement” was a fool’s errand. I realized that I went on that errand too many times.

Here’s more from NBZ’s essay:

“At one point during my 11 years as their pastor, I realized that the congregation just seemed to be really good at loving each other. It was wild. But it wasn’t because LOVE was the focus. It was because GRACE was the focus. Some things only happen as a result of focusing on other things, and yet as Americans we want to approach everything head on….

“If new folks were welcomed with ‘the thing we want you to know about this community is that we love each other well!’ we would have failed to become a community that ended up being pretty good at loving each other, but we for sure would have succeeded at becoming a community that was endlessly disappointed in ourselves and others for everything said or done that could be deemed ‘not very loving.’ I know the following claim does not fill anyone with sparkly inspiration, but I think it is true: aspiration so often becomes the raw material of accusation.

“[W]hen we would have a . . . brunch for newcomers, folks were invited to say what drew them to the church — or for the old timers, what has kept them there. ‘I love the inclusivity, or the sense of community or the singing, or the fact that I don’t have to believe certain things in order to belong,’ etc… And that’s when I would say ‘I love all those things too! But what I need you to hear me say is this: this community will disappoint you. We will fail to live up to your expectations of us. I will say something stupid that hurts your feelings. We invite you to stay after that happens, because if you leave you will miss the way that grace flows in to fill the cracks left behind by our failures.’

“I’ve seen it. It’s real. I’ve seen grace fly in with healing in her wings and fill in the cracks — and I’ve seen how it softens me and leaves me with a cleaner heart than just getting it all right from the beginning (because I aspired to do so) — ever has.”

To broaden this insight out a bit to the currently poor, fractured soul of our nation, it seems to me that as a country we’re living in a time when we have lots of gnarly problems and we keep wanting to hit everything “head on.” We get immensely frustrated when that familiar go-to (“try harder”) doesn’t work. But sometimes when you bump up against one of life’s impasses, whether in personal life or the life of a group/organization, hitting it again harder, going to your go-to, isn’t the answer. What it may be is a time to step back and confess I/we need help.

As I think back over my own life and ministry it seems that it has been a winding journey from “try harder” to “let God be God.” A journey from trying to get it right on my own, to letting God make it right in ways I never imagined.

Back to NBZ for the last word:

“Some of the best things in this terrible/beautiful life happen without us trying, and in fact could never happen as a result of us trying. That’s grace and it is absolutely everywhere.”