Develop a Discipleship System
5 Reasons Why Failure Could Lead to Renewal and Innovation
By Bener Agtarap
In this month’s Path 1 Church Planting Resources Hub, we highlight an article by Rev. Christopher Coon that challenges how we view failure in ministry. Instead of treating failure as something to avoid or hide, he suggests that it can become a powerful teacher and a pathway to growth. For church planters and leaders, the reality is that not every initiative will succeed—but what matters is how we respond. With courage, creativity, and honest reflection, failure can open doors to unexpected renewal and innovation.
Drawing from his book Failing Boldly, Coon outlines practical ways to integrate failure into the life of ministry. In this article, you’ll discover five compelling reasons why failure can be a gift: it deepens our reliance on prayer and courage, it pushes us to “think different” and experiment boldly, and it reminds us that evaluation and learning are essential for long-term vitality. By embracing these lessons, we can move beyond fear of mistakes and toward a ministry culture that takes faithful risks for the sake of God’s mission.
Failing Boldly
By Christopher Coon
I still have vivid memories of attending a conference fifteen years ago at a large church in the Chicago area and walking out of the auditorium feeling a little depressed. The venue was immaculate; the worship band was worthy of Grammy awards, and the speakers were top-notch. So, why wasn’t I inspired? The more I thought about it, the more I realized that it all felt a little too perfect. I had been in ministry long enough to know that not everything goes as smoothly as this conference. When you’re in a profession where you interact a lot with people, there are bound to be hiccups, conflicts, and hurt feelings. Why, I wondered, did no one talk about these things? Not every ministry is going to multiply tenfold within months! I yearned to hear professional religious people talk about something that didn’t work. That was the beginning of my interest in failure.
It's been eight years since the publication of my book, Failing Boldly: How Falling Down In Ministry Can Be the Start of Rising Up (Discipleship Resources, 2017), and it still feels pretty relevant, especially as we continue to recover from COVID and the sharp decline of church participation. I titled one of the chapters “How to Succeed While Failing,” and encouraged readers to schedule and plan for failure so that new opportunities and innovations may pop up.
It's not easy to do this because we’re all desperate to find success or any sign of growth. However, if the idea piques your interest, here are five key components of failure integration to consider:
1. Pray for courageous hearts.
It’s a bit of a cliché to say that every new venture should begin with prayer, but I often find that prayer is more lip service than intentional. I appreciate Sue Nilson Kibbey’s comments about prayer, where she notes that many churches snack on prayer rather than feast on it. I find that to be true.
Deciding to integrate failure into your ministry takes a kind of courage that none of us can muster on our own. Integrating failure means taking risks and setting yourself up for potential ridicule. I don’t know about you, but risk and ridicule aren’t things I can handle on my own. I can take these first steps only because of the courageous heart that others have intentionally prayed into me.
Please don’t skip this first step. Taking risks that can end in failure is hard. Truly, the only way you’ll make it through is if you’re intentional about having others pray for a courageous heart for you—and by praying for it yourself.
2. Think different.
In his biography of Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson described the thinking behind the Apple marketing campaign, “Think different.” Many people thought that Apple got the grammar wrong, that it should have been phrased, “Think differently,” but that’s not how Jobs saw it:
Jobs insisted that he wanted ‘different’ to be used as a noun, as in ‘think victory’ or ‘think beauty.’ Jobs also specifically said that ‘think differently’ wouldn’t have the same meaning to him. Also, Jobs wanted to make it sound colloquial, like the phrase ‘think big (Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs, Simon and Schuster, 2021).
There’s a difference, then, between thinking different and thinking differently. Thinking different entails a larger risk, a new way of seeing things. Thinking differently means making small changes, but it doesn’t necessarily bring about the wholesale change that needs to be made. It’s the difference between adding some contemporary hymns (thinking differently) and starting a worship service in a bowling alley (thinking different). We’re at a time where we need to do a lot more thinking different.
3. Set failure goals and celebrate failures.
We've probably all been through a goal-setting process for things like worship growth or increased mission giving. These are fine things to do. But what would it look like to set failure goals, too? Stretch yourself at least once or twice a year to try something that seems impossible or improbable. Integrating this into any goal setting could be a helpful way to normalize (and not stigmatize) failure. In addition, it’s important to celebrate failure, too! I’ve incorporated a Turtle Award in our conference, where my office gives funds to a church that stuck its neck out (hence, the turtle connection) and tried something that didn’t work out as planned. I hope this is a small way to reward (and celebrate) churches that continue to stretch and experiment.
4. Know the importance of not being earnest.
When Trey Hall and I first started thinking about planting a new church together, I’ll never forget something Trey said. I’m paraphrasing here, but I remember Trey saying something like, “So many churches today are so earnest. I want us to have fun while we’re doing this.”
In Failing Boldly, I wrote,
When seriousness and earnestness dominate an organization’s culture, these attributes can heighten the negative impact of failure. I fear it’s one of the side effects of the sky-is-falling mentality of some mainline church leaders. Decline begets fear, which begets earnestness, which ramps up the anxiety whenever one tries something new.
When trying new things, it’s important to live out Psalm 126:2:
Our mouths were suddenly filled with laughter;
our tongues were filled with joyful shouts.
It was even said, at that time, among the nations,
“The Lord has done great things for them!” (CEB[1])
5. Do a review
Not surprisingly, this is probably the most important part of setting failure goals and the hardest to do. There are at least a couple of reasons for this. First, when you schedule an event or try a new thing, you feel a mix of relief and exhaustion when it’s over. You just spent a lot of energy and need a long nap, and then you move on. Second, doing a review means you’ll likely have to face a few things that didn’t go well. Who likes to dwell on that? There are talks I gave several years ago that didn’t go particularly well, and I still don’t want to go back and figure out why they didn’t click.
But doing a review is necessary. I wrote in Failing Boldly:
For now, we want to make sure that we are learning from failure, so we don’t simply fail for failure’s sake. This isn’t easy, of course, because who, other than coroners, likes to do autopsies? Evaluation is crucial, though. When people ask us about church planting and whether there are particular conferences to attend or books to read, we often encourage them to think about going through community organizing training, which, among other things, helps individuals learn the necessity of building public relationships. Something else we’ve learned from community organizing is that anything worth doing is worth evaluating.
It's been ten years since I first started writing Failing Boldly, and I still find it pretty relevant to my ministry. It’s still important to try new things. Failing at doing new things still stings. And God is with us in the rising and the falling.
About Rev. Christian Coon
Christian Coon is a native Iowan who has lived in the Chicago area for over three decades. An ordained elder in The United Methodist Church, he co-founded Urban Village Church and now serves as Director of Congregational Development for the Northern Illinois Conference. He is the author of Expanding the Expedition Through Church Partnerships, Evangelizing Christians for the Journey, and Failing Boldly, and has coached and consulted with numerous church planters across the denomination. Christian and his wife, Anne, live in Chicago’s South Loop and are the parents of two adult children, Caroline and Ethan.
[1] Common English Bible (CEB) Copyright © 2011 by Common English Bible.
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