Develop a Discipleship System
Can’t They Just Leave Things the Way They’ve Always Been?
By Ken Sloane
I was on a four-day trip to Iowa, doing five workshops on stewardship in the local church in five towns across the state. A friend on the conference staff hosted me in his home, which had a lovely upstairs guest suite with a great bedroom and bath attached.
The first morning, I got up early and went to take a shower. And I couldn’t, for the life of me, figure out how the tub-shower worked. Turning the water on was fine, but how could I get the water to come out of the showerhead instead of the tub spout? I looked everywhere and couldn’t see anything that would make that happen!
“Those darn engineers! Why can’t they stop messing with things and just leave it the way it’s always been!”
I admit; there was a little ego involved. Traveling a good bit prior to the pandemic, I probably stayed in hotel rooms fifty nights a year, sometimes outside the country, and I was always able to (eventually) get the shower to come on. So, it was a little embarrassing to think of saying to my hosts, “No, I haven’t showered because I couldn’t figure out how to make the water come out of the showerhead.”
So, there I was, grumbling under my breath about the engineers who feel the need to keep changing things all the time, can’t just leave things the way they were, the way it was familiar to me. All of a sudden, I caught myself and said, “Whoa, there it is – the fear of change!” I will talk about this at least once in every workshop I do, and I’ve been saying it for years: “If the church is going to thrive, we know we need to let go of our desire to keep things ‘the way they’ve always been’ and do some things differently!”
It seems to me that the hardest part of being innovative is not coming up with new ideas and ways of doing things as much as it is being able to let go of things we’ve done the same way that just feel so comfortable. It’s less about saying “hello” to the new way of doing things and more about our hesitancy to say “goodbye” to things we’ve done one way that no longer give us the best results.
It seems to me that the hardest part of being innovative is not coming up with new ideas and ways of doing things as much as it is being able to let go of things we’ve done the same way that just feel so comfortable. It’s less about saying “hello” to the new way of doing things and more about our hesitancy to say “goodbye” to things we’ve done one way that no longer give us the best results.
So, did I get my shower? Well, after not coming up with the answer on my own, I embraced the problem-solving tool of the twenty-first century: I Googled. And the first link I clicked on had the question on the exact Delta faucet hardware that had been frustrating me. Going back eight to ten years, people had been trying to figure it out. I finally came to the answer. On the tub spout, there is a ring right at the end of the spout that acts as the “diverter.” When you pull the ring down, the water goes up to the showerhead!
So, yes, I got my shower each morning, went out each morning squeaky clean, and ready to do my workshops about being open to change and doing things a new way.
With my apologies to the engineers . . .
Ken Sloane is the Director of Stewardship & Generosity for Discipleship Ministries of The United Methodist Church.
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