Chess and Church Leadership

A look back at a snapshot in time. I wrote this coming up to two years ago (Autumn 2010). It's funny re-reading it and seeing how much we've turned into the rally car. If you're involved in something small but meaningful, where change is slow because it just has to be... hopefully this will be somehow encouraging.

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People often say church leadership is busy. Not just busy in the sense of taking up a lot of time. Busy as in frenetic, fragmented, bits and pieces, lots going on at once. In the churches I’ve previously been a part of or worked closely with, there seems to be so much happening all the time that it almost has to run like a big business corporation or a well-oiled machine. The leaders seem to hurtle at breakneck speed like rally drivers, steering something that works in cohesion and fixing parts when something goes wrong or adding new components to further improve things. Life at All Hallows, Bow right now is somewhat different.

I’m not very good at chess. Even when it briefly became ‘cool’ halfway through primary school and I had my little ‘chess phase’, my problem was that I could only ever think about the next move.  Now of course, it is vitally important to be able to actually make that next move… but in order for it to be a good one, it helps to have a game plan- to know where this particular positioning of pieces fits into an overarching, all-encompassing strategy. Apparently the greatest players can see what’s going to happen about 20 moves ahead, expertly predicting the initiatives of both players in the game.

Right now, as we attempt to inject life into a place that’s full of lovely people but has hit upon hard times, it’s more like a game of chess than a ride in a rally car. Far from steering a juggernaut or just checking the parts, we’re involved in something that may, for a while, move necessarily slow. Why? Well, it’s a big change… and as we are surely all aware, change is scary. Too much too fast is a course of action that’s born of passion but devoid of wisdom.

It would be easy to lose patience with the handful of people who’ve been here for years- the east end heroes who’ve battled so hard to even keep our church open. It’s tempting to say that it would be easier to just start from scratch somewhere else, rather than coming to something that already exists with its endearing quirks, harrowing issues (we all have them) and intriguing history… but there’s just so much more merit in instead persevering with something that’s already happening- attempting to help rescue something that was destined for death and be part of its rising from flames and ashes.

And so, we wait.

We commit to patience.

We play chess.

While we will not do nothing, neither will we rush, because this is long-haul ministry and if that means it’s slow by necessity, that our days are full not of juggling many ministries but of steady focus on just one thing, then that’s the game plan we’ll take.

And so, as we sit down at our desks and begin our work for another week, we think about the bigger strategy for how to win this game, knowing that we fight not against our people but against a subtle, unseen enemy… and with that in mind, we work out our next move.