So, when so someone comes along with a slick plan that seems to make ministry that much more “rational” (that was a buzzword in government and business in the first half of the 20th century) it’s hard to resist. It’s something that elders, who might also be businessmen can understand and support. It seems to build bridges but it also, subtly perhaps, puts us just a little bit more in control of church and ministry and tends to marginalize the Word, sacraments, and Spirit (were that possible).

My Papa (Grandpa) was a great handyman. It seemed as if he could fix just about anything. He always brought his tools when he visited and we often had work for him to do. I remember the first time he said to me, “work smarter, not harder.” My first reaction, when he said that, was to think, “that’s just lazy.” Of course he wasn’t lazy and he wasn’t counseling sloth. He was teaching me to use the right tools, the right way. He was teaching me not to waste time.

Efficiency is a practical virtue. One of the most difficult things, for me, about living in the UK was (what I perceived to be) their attitude toward work and efficiency. I’m an American. I like efficiency. I like to get things done in (what seems to me to be) good time. In the UK, however, it seemed as if everything took three weeks to get done. The postal service was an exception. That was amazing. Put a note in the local post in the AM, get a reply in the PM.  Please don’t misunderstand. Our British hosts were gracious and kind but that they do believe in paperwork and bureaucracy and it seemed to take 3 weeks for paperwork to go through. The pace of life and work was slower than that with which I was familiar.

By the time I arrived, Americans had been traveling to this university for study for centuries nevertheless, more than once I was given to think that we were the first ever to do it. Nevertheless, it was a good experience. It was one thing to know theoretically that attitudes toward time, work, and efficiency are culturally conditioned and it was another to experience first hand those differences.

I mention my Papa and the UK to illustrate how culturally conditioned our attitudes toward time and “efficiency” are. A good bit of what we think of as “efficient” in North America is the product of a movement that developed alongside the industrialization of American business. In the early 20th century companies hired “experts” with stop watches to visit their factories and to show them have to “make economies” of time and motion.

Prior to the industrial revolution, prior to the urbanization of America, we were a largely rural, agrarian people with concomitant attitudes toward time and efficiency. Once a farmer (my other Grandpa was a wheat farmer and a cattle rancher) plants, apart from maintenance, there’s not much he can do to hurry things. A farmer/rancher might go out to check fences, cattle, and crops in the morning and might not get anything obviously productive done all day but farmers and ranchers aren’t lazy by any means. Their experience of time, schedules, and deadlines is not that of the factory manager.

Over the years as I’ve had to opportunity to teach students from across the world and I’ve watched them adjust to our attitudes about deadlines, schedules, time, and efficiency. Indeed, there are cultural differences within the USA and even from place to place in Southern California. People here talk about “coastal time,” which reflects a more relaxed attitude toward time and deadlines than exists 20 miles inland. Certainly attitudes about time and schedules are differ between Southern California and Chicago and Nebraska. Mrs Heidelblog had a band teacher who used to say, “to be early is to be on time and to be on time is to be late.”

On its face this is nonsense but we understand what he was trying to say and perhaps he was right, for his culture but the question for us is whether we should try to baptize that attitude toward time, to make it a Christian virtue or to use it as a lever by which to guide life in the visible, institutional church.

This is a relevant question for a variety of reasons. You might be surprised to learn how much is done in the church in the name of efficiency. When I was in school we had a teacher who was much enamored with the self-described “church growth” movement. At the beginning of a course he gave us a talk about time management in which he tried to persuade us that we should be good managers of our time because God was a good manager of redemptive history.

That argument did not sit well with me and over the years I’ve realized why. It confused the common, the natural, the secular with the sacred. There was no need to try to authorize the practice of time management by cloaking it in the history of redemption. All that was necessary was to say, “Here is some practical wisdom that I’ve gained that you might find useful.” Because, on reflection, the history of redemption was hardly efficient.

Who knows how many years elapsed from the fall to Noah and Job and from them to Abraham. From that point the chronology is reasonably clear. Even so, is it efficient to spend 2,000 years fulfilling the promise to Abraham? What about the 40 years wandering the desert? Have you ever tracked the path the Israelites took? It’s enough to give an efficiency expert a coronary. What about the exile? Wasn’t all that time “wasted”? Indeed, once our Lord in the flesh came he took his sweet time teaching the disciples. Why three years? What about all their wandering. No, I’m afraid that the stop-watch carrying efficiency expert would be disappointed.

Read More