"Good to Great" and applications to church

The next part of Good to Great Collins talks about confronting the brutal facts wthout losing hope that we can prevail. He writes about companies needing to come to grips with the realities of a situation and acting on those realities while still maintaining a belief that they would persevere. Other companies that were in similar businesses but faltered did so because they had their blinders on about the realities of the situation or they became overwhelmed by the obstacles to overcome.

He then made an analogy of a real person, a man by the name of Jim Stockdale who had been a POW in Vietnam, tortured many times over the years. He eventually made it out and went on with his life in a successful way, including a book chronicalling the events of his time as a POW. Collins had a chance to talk with him and asked him about who didn't make it out.

Stockdale's answer was "The optimists. Oh they were the eones who said, 'We're going to be out by Christmas.' And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they'd say. 'We're going to be out by Easter.' And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart...This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end - which you can never afford to lose - with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be."

In this I saw parallels to the church and what is happening with the emergent church and post-charismatics. Many of us were in churches that were optimistic. "Revival is coming!" "Your cancer will be healed!" "You're depression will be gone!" I've heard preaching that would encourage people to actually ignore the reality that they see all around them in favour of what they would refer to as "spiritual truth".

But many of us tired of that. We got sick of the hope for more immediate things that didn't happen again and again and again. But we forgot that our hope is not for now, but for eternity. The now and the not yet. God is here for us now, but it is not in the fullness that we desire. And when we ignore the present facts, we sometimes fail to act in ways that would benefit us and others in the present.

The church, like all of us, cannot afford to ignore the brutal facts of reality for optimism. Neither can we go a route that denies the fact that God will prevail, and us with him. The church needs realists.