The sermon series bombed. The new worship format left people confused. The community outreach program that consumed months of planning attracted three people — and two of them were already members.
In ministry leadership, we don’t just experience failure; we experience it publicly, often before the very people we’re called to serve. It’s painful to experience. Yet our faith tradition is built on stories of failure transformed.
Peter denied Christ three times before becoming the rock of the church. Paul persecuted Christians before becoming Christianity’s greatest evangelist. The cross itself appeared to be the ultimate failure before revealing itself as the ultimate triumph. Failure is woven into the biblical narrative, but we struggle when it shows up in our ministry.
Fear of failure creates a paralyzing perfectionism. We overthink decisions, avoid experimentation and remain locked in familiar patterns even when they’re no longer effective. Ultimately, the problem isn’t that we fail. The problem is that we treat failure as a shameful secret rather than an inevitable part of faithful innovation. When we hide our missteps, we model a faith that demands perfection rather than one that offers grace.
What if we approached new ministry initiatives not as programs that must succeed, but as faithful experiments that will teach us something regardless of outcome? This shift in perspective doesn’t lower our standards. It reframes our experience.
If you want to learn from failure, keep in mind that when efforts don’t achieve expected results, whatever happens gives us valuable information about our context, our community’s needs and our own capacities. It’s also important to name reality honestly, but without catastrophizing. God has not abandoned the church or the minister simply because results are underwhelming.
The next time a ministry initiative doesn’t work, resist the urge to either desperately defend it or pretend it never happened. Instead, gather the stakeholders. Ask what you learned together. Then discern what faithful experiment you might try next.
Resources
The hard and surprisingly hopeful lessons for churches five years after COVID
Pastors share what they’ve learned about their congregations, about the work of the church and about themselves five years after the pandemic forced most to close their doors.
By Edie Gross
Loving through failure
There are life lessons in being a loyal fan of a team, whatever their win-loss record, writes the director of communications for Leadership Education at Duke Divinity.
By Emily Lund
Closing a church does not mean failure
Closing a church can be terrifying, but you don’t have to do it alone, says a sociologist and pastor.
Q&A with Gail Cafferata
To do new things well, congregations must learn
An effective learning process almost always begins with comprehensively yet succinctly naming the challenge at hand, the president of the Indianapolis Center for Congregations says in this interview about his book.
Q&A with Tim Shapiro
Before you go
It might sound surprising, but Scripture offers us remarkable freedom to fail. Think about the parable of the talents. It’s not just about the servants who succeeded. It’s also about the one who was so afraid of failure that he buried his treasure rather than risk losing it. Jesus rebuked him because he refused to risk failing. You might even say that the gospel is about taking risks and being vulnerable.
Everything we try is not going to succeed. In 1 Chronicles 13, David failed to bring the ark of the covenant to Jerusalem the first time he tried. He failed miserably, he realized what he needed to do differently and in 1 Chronicles 16, he succeeded. When we fail, let’s learn from what happened and keep moving forward.
You can always reach me and the Alban Weekly team at alban@duke.edu. Until next week, keep leading!
Prince R. Rivers
Editor, Alban at Duke Divinity