Feedback is the Breakfast of Champions

If I had known how bad the email was going to be, I would have opened it more carefully. It was the kind of missive that felt like an explosive going off, with sharp pieces of shrapnel detonating from my computer screen and lodging deeply into my gut and heart. I had asked a friend of mine to read some of my writing, and his commentary was ruthless. I had asked for critique. I felt wounded when he delivered. 

“I hope he was at least nice about it?” another friend asked me as I wept to her of my hurt feelings. 

It was a clarifying question. “No, he wasn’t nice at all,” I said. “He was direct and honest.” I couldn’t fault him for doing what I asked of him. “Nice” hadn’t been the assignment. I thought of all the times I have shared my writing with readers, looking for feedback, only to receive faint praise or, even worse, a ghosting. Many people live by the pithy advice that saying nothing is the better choice when “nice” doesn’t feel possible. But this is writing that I hope to have published. Faint praise and cowardly politeness weren’t going to help me. Ghosting might feel nicer, but it creates a lasting cruelty. His words were hard to receive, and I am still nursing some hurt feelings and broken dreams. I also have insight and perspective that I could not generate on my own which will make my writing better. 

This past month I had the privilege of interviewing Mike Cosper for the podcast I co-host, Future Christian. Cosper was the voice of Christianity Today’s groundbreaking podcast The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill. The podcast explores the leadership of the church’s founder, Mark Driscoll, and identifies how the seeds of his and the community’s destruction were planted from the start. Through meticulous research and interviews, he analyzes the grace and harm individuals across the community experienced through their participation in the success and scandal attached to Driscoll.  

Cosper’s new book, The Church in Dark Times, delves more deeply into the dynamics behind the collapse of one of America’s most infamous megachurches. He looks at one central incident in Mars Hill’s life. When the church was in its period of rapid expansion, two of the church’s elders were fired and excommunicated for having raised valid concerns about the proposed governance structure. It was a harbinger of things to come; Driscoll’s unfettered and increasingly toxic authority and the deputizing of other leaders in the community to cover up his wrong-doings and to silence those who raised opposition. Cosper asks the question, “How did all of these faithful people support this kind of wrongdoing?” 

What he discovers is of critical importance. It wasn’t that Driscoll’s supporters weren’t aware of his bullying ways. It wasn’t that they thought that silencing critics was the right thing to do either. Instead, they came to believe that the success of Mars Hill justified doing some wrong things and supporting a very toxic leader. They bought in so fully to the importance of the institution that they were building, that they came to agree that any voice speaking in opposition to that institutional vision, even in constructive and faithful ways, had to be excised.  

The Mars Hill podcast and Cosper’s book, The Church in Dark Times, should be mandatory listening/reading for anyone in church leadership. Much of the American megachurch culture it describes is foreign to Canadian Anglicans, particularly the enormity of the platforms that celebrity pastors like Driscoll generate. Yet the dynamics described apply to us too, even if smaller in scope. Our churches can also be very personality-driven. We, too, can experience the Messiah complex, the weight of expectation that we will have the thing that will save the church. We are all swimming in the rising waters of secularism, facing diminishing numbers across the institutional church in all denominations, and serving in systems that can easily be consumed with anxiety for their survival. We make decisions, on the parish and diocesan level, about how we view critical voices, and when the thing that we’re trying to build feels important and fragile, we can conclude that opposing voices are threatening rather than necessary for faithful discernment. 

I interviewed another guest on Future Christian a number of months ago. The Reverend Rob Hurkmans will be well known to many in Niagara. He is now the rector of Trinity Streetsville. Twenty years into ordained ministry, he noted that his attitude about Christian leadership has changed dramatically. He used to believe that what was needed was a strong visionary leader who would lead the charge into the church’s future. What he has found, however, is that the religious landscape in which we are operating is changing so rapidly that the future configuration of the church is ultimately unknowable. What we must do is figure this out, with much fear and trembling, together. “I have found out that the smartest voice in the room is the room,” he said.  

Thankfully, the promise to the church is that where two or three gather together, Christ is in our midst. We’re going to need that promise because we all know something about how criticism can feel like shrapnel and because the Mars Hill saga serves as a warning against that all-too-easy impulse to chop off the head of dissenting voices to warn trespassers. We can easily make the mistake of imagining we can be healthy—individually or collectively—by getting rid of opposition, when in fact, we are sewing the seeds of our destruction. 

The church’s historical record tells us that the church has routinely been a contested space, that uniformity across Christians in how they view Jesus and what that means for our communal life is non-existent. That doesn’t mean critical voices don’t hurt, particularly when we are trying to offer something to the world—a vision, a plan, a piece of writing—that feels attached to our very souls. It does mean, that God promises to show up in the spaces between our differing perspectives, our vulnerabilities and uncertainties, and our brave offerings. We can lay down our guards and look with expectation for the wisdom God is going to lift up in the hard conversations between us.