Call me weird, but I have a thing about being late! Maybe it was the way I was raised, it could have something to do with my own personal strength array, or it could be the OC person hiding inside. But, I don't like late.
Slow is a problem too. Us achievers like things to move along at a steady pace and so lagging behind is the brother-in-law of lateness in my book. Sure, I know all about the fruit of the spirit---patience, perseverance, endurance, and the be-still-and-know stuff. But, slow and late are two personal traits I want the people behind me to have.
This is more than personal preference, however. You see, the world has been re-engineered for speed. Leonard Sweet's Carpe Manana, naturalization classes for immigrants in the new world, clarifies that the paradigm has shifted from vast in the old world to fast in the new. A couple of years ago I read a nifty little book titled It's Not the Big that Eat the Small, but the Fast that Eat the Slow, a primer for operating at the velocity of the times. Effective organizations and people understand re-gearing the machinery for business in fast times. The customer service world is paced and regulated by speed. Organizational charts and hierarchies are being stream-lined for fast decisions and efficient operation. Many new congregations are governed by elders and guidelines that facilitate quick response to mission initiatives. It is the new world.
And, then there are the Southern Baptists, basically geared for slow. Tangled in multiple organizational layers, complex governering documents, over-lapping approval systems, and time-consuming procedures, we have to jump through numerous hoops to react to the needs of a world going to you know where in a hand basket. It's more than a little hypocritical to pray with urgency and talk about world evangelism with great passion when our delivery system is mired in 1950's structures and antiquated procedures. While world systems are centralizing authority, elevating Level 5 leaders (see Collins, Good to Great), vesting trust in high response teams, and removing obstacles that impede decision making, we're caught in a time warp of epic proportions.
Getting into the new world is going to require some serious thought and determined leadership at every level of denominational life. The loss of mission and resulting funding declines we are experiencing now may be attributed, at least in part, to outdated structures and slow-moving corporate machinery. Mission in this new world will require innovative thinking, precise definition, and recovery of vision that can be articulated in a forthright and straight-forward way.
Life @ the speed of late is not acceptable when thinking about our assignment. Better late than never cannot work in Kingdom enterprise because late most often means never. To recover our sense of mission and the confidence than inspires Kingdom giving, we must seek life @ the speed of God, a holy urgency that strips away the layers of slowness and positions us to be first responders to a world in crisis. I'm praying the Great Commission Resurgence Task Force report, adopted in June at the Orlando annual session of the Southern Baptist Convention, will mean just that: a re-examination of how we do business so we can do the work of the one who sent us while it is yet day.
Because the night is coming. And, then it is too late.
Life @ the speed of late should never define us.
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