Tomorrow the Kansas City Chiefs begin their 50th season with a preseason game against the Houston Texans.
I am hopeful for a better season than last year with a refreshed roster and coaching staff.
I’m not predicting the Super Bowl, but a .500 season is quite attainable.
For sports teams and churches, incremental changes are most likely and more attainable than worst to first.
Rev. Andrew Conard 
3 replies on “Incremental Change in Sports and Church”
good luck to the Chiefs, Andrew. I was wondering if we could take this comparison a bit farther. What qualities of consistently excellent teams like my Pittsburgh Steelers, are also found in churches that are successfully fulfilling their mission of making disciples?
Good question. What do you think?
My first thought would be they tend to look for their newest recruits from outside the system instead of using alot of retreads. Pittsburgh largely builds through the draft, new players, not players who have already learned other NFL systems, including their successes and bad habits. Successful churches tend to try to reach more unchurched people, people from outside of Christianity, people who haven’t been as tainted by bad habits they may have learned elsewhere on how to do “church” that are really more dysfunctional then anything.
Another thing is successful teams tend to have long term leadership that empowers its coaches and management to do their jobs and does not second guess them. Pittsburgh’s owners, the Rooneys, help out but mainly get involved in making sure that the core values of the team are being lived out by its coaches and management and shown by the kind of players they make members of their team.
It seems to me that a successful church would need to do the same thing. The head pastor would mainly mentor the top leadership and make sure the church leaders know the core values and mission of the church and that their actions are consistent with those values.
But that’s all I can think of off the top of my head.
Scott