Creating New Opportunities: Part 1
“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” - James Clear
This quote, from the book Atomic Habits has stuck with me since I initially read it. To put it another way, will power alone isn’t enough for a person to reach their goals. Instead, a person will only succeed as much as their systems let them. So unless you have a system for how to attain your specific goals (a specific diet plan for losing weight for example), you most likely will not find the change you hope for.
This idea can play out in communities as well. For our congregation specifically, when we want to do something better (be more welcoming, serve more families, increase our mission efforts, etc.), we most likely will not achieve those goals by will power alone, but rather by creating systems in which we can address the specifics of those goals.
We’ve slowly been doing this with some of our newer initiatives. We saw that we were not building the community we wanted to, as many times on Sundays, we only interacted with the same few people. So instead of simply saying, “We have to try harder,” we changed our systems so that we could better address our goals.
We created our Sunday morning Coffee Break as a way to better address our goal of building community. Recently, I saw specifically how this change in systems allowed us to address our goals in ways we hadn’t been able to before.
My parents have visited Central many times since I started as an associate pastor in 2022. They’ve never complained or said any negative remarks about their time at Central. But on more than one occasion, after service, I’ve asked them about anyone they met, and each time they mentioned only one or two people.
This has always surprised me because I’ve always found our congregation to be a very friendly and welcoming community. How were my parents not meeting more people?
The last time they visited was on my first Sunday preaching as Senior Pastor. After service, I asked them about their experience.
“Everyone was so friendly! We met so many people! We had a lot of conversations with people we hadn’t met before!”
While I wasn’t surprised at this, I was curious why this experience had been so different from their previous ones. One could attribute it to it being my first Sunday preaching, but I wasn’t convinced of that, seeing as I wasn’t actually new to the congregation and I had preached many times before. So, I decided to pry a bit.
“The previous times you visited, when did you arrive and which door did you come in?” I asked.
“Every other time, we’ve entered through the Welcome Center at about 10:40am and gone straight to the sanctuary to sit down.
Beginning to better understand, I asked, “When you arrived today, what time was it and which door did you come in?”
“We showed up a little after 10:30am and came into the fellowship hall.”
This is when it clicked for me. It wasn’t that our congregation wasn’t friendly or welcoming: we just didn’t have ample opportunities to demonstrate hospitality to others.
Before we had Coffee Break, there was so little time before the worship service began that most of us would leave our Sunday school classes and walk directly to the sanctuary and take our seats, leaving little time and few opportunities for conversations. This is what my parents were experiencing.
In contrast, this most recent time, when they entered the fellowship hall, people were already looking around for new faces, and were in a space and time designed specifically for meeting new people.
It’s not that we didn’t have the desire to be more welcoming before. We just didn’t have ample systems, or opportunities, to do so. When we allow ourselves to make adjustments to the existing ways of doing things, we may just create new opportunities for our best parts to shine.