A Lesson Learned

The gang had always met on Saturday morning. There were those who worked, and those who didn’t want to drive at night and so a Saturday morning worked for everybody. However after a couple of years the makeup of the group changed and there was no longer had anyone attending who was employed five days a week. 

But we kept the Saturday morning hoping that some might return. 

However at the end of that third year, the consensus was that we would go to a weekday afternoon which better suited the current members of the group. So Monday afternoon was picked. The new year saw us with two new members; one brand-new and the other, the person we had kept the Saturday time slot for hoping she would come back. It turned out that she actually preferred a weekday too and was willing to adapt her work time schedule to fit!

Some people might say in a case like the that you can’t win! I prefer to think that we actually won in more than one way. We got a meeting time that was more convenient AND we got back one of our former members who had been missed!

But just what else does this little vignette have to teach us because I believe that it does contain probably more that one lesson. The group presumed that they knew the best time for the meeting and tried to accommodate everyone without actually asking if they would find another time more convenient… and so we lost a member for a year. However some of the blame must also be put on the person who left, because they weren’t proactive in suggesting what might work better for themselves. A comedy of errors?  Perhaps, but think how often a similar scenario is played out in our lives. For whatever reason, we are reticent to speak out about what our needs are.  Are we afraid of offending? And that would be because ??? Do we not feel worthy to have an opinion? I hope not. Are we trying to live up to the Golden Rule? Surely we would want others to tell us if they needed the time changed, so we should do the same for them.

I think in a way this reflects the culture of the church today - and BTW this is a group under the auspices of the church. The culture of the church asks questions, but doesn’t listen or act on the answers. The culture of the church presumes to know what is best for the participants and expects them to fit into the predetermined model. The culture of the church frowns on people actually asking for changes to be made, in most cases dismissing those suggestions out of hand. And the culture if the church is then surprised and dismayed when those people leave and don’t come back.

So has our group learned a lesson? I hope so….