Losers

This idea hasn't but thought through very carefully but I wanted to get it down on paper before I lost it.

On the way to a meeting this morning I was listening to sports talk radio where the topic was the championship basketball game that was played last night. They were talking about elite college basketball coaches and it was mentioned that they are scared to death of losing. A loss affects them emotionally much more forcefully than a win does.

In church circles we often talk about "wins". We look for wins. We count wins. We keep track of wins. I'm not sure that we spend much time thinking about losing. That isn't very popular and it seems like a rather negative thing to do.

If we aren't careful we may not even know what it means to lose in a church sense. And if we don't know that how can we even begin to be afraid of it. I don't think we spend very much time considering what losing means in a church.

I think losing in a church changes depending on the season any given church is in. Probably the most recognizable loss is if we have to close the doors. When a church gets close to that they probably do begin to fear losing and some of them are probably motivated to actually do something about it. But losing probably means something else to most churches.

This does fit in well with the missional stuff I've been going through with our church. Changing our scorecard does help us define what it means to win but it should probably also help us understand what it means for us to lose.

The benefit of being afraid to lose may be that it helps us define what normal is for us. If all of our focus is on winning it can give us the feeling that we our losers focused on winning. Our normal is to lose but our goal is to win. If the focus is on our fear of losing it gives the sense that we are winners who are afraid to lose. Our normal is winning and our goal is to keep it that way.

There are a lot of arguments against this and the infamous "playing not to lose" mantra quickly comes to mind. Like I said in the beginning, I haven't put a lot of thought into this and the theory seems to have a lot of holes in it. But it did strike me that elite coaches seemed to have this trait in common and that we rarely talk about it in church. I think there is something to the idea that we should know what it means for us to lose and we should be deathly afraid of it. Having said that, didn't Steve Taylor write a song called "Jesus Is For Losers"?