Organised Messiness: Why an Element of Grace Beats Efficiency Every Time
THE SHOCK ABSORBER
King Charles walked into Congress this week and gave one of the most quietly effective speeches in recent diplomatic memory. No combativeness, no direct rebuttal of the things that had been said about Britain, no obvious political agenda. Just — the King, being the king. Funny, self-deprecating, historically rich, gently weaving in all the things he wanted the room to remember without once appearing to try.
What does good leadership look like when you're not trying to win an argument, you're trying to build something together?
The Business Metaphor Problem
The church project management conversation starts with a caution, and the caution is worth taking seriously before getting to the practical stuff.
Tim brings in two threads. The first is Andy Crouch's framework of cultural postures — the warning against copying and consuming cultural forms rather than creating something genuinely new. The second is Marshall McLuhan's insight that the medium is the message: the metaphors you use to describe what you're doing aren't neutral, they shape what you actually do.
If you manage a church primarily through business and corporate metaphors — efficiency, outputs, measurable outcomes, strategic planning, KPIs — you don't just get a more business-like church. You get a church that, at the level of imagination, is structured around the logic of a corporation. And corporations don't leave 99 to go after the one. Corporations run on the logic of the many, not the one.
The danger isn't that business thinking is always wrong. It's that it can slip in quietly and reshape the way you think about people, about God, about what success looks like — without you ever deciding to let it. The medium carries its own message, and if you're not paying attention, you'll absorb that message whether you intended to or not.
Tim's further warning is one worth sitting with: you can run spiritual disciplines the same way. You can pray, read the Bible, fast, attend church, observe the Sabbath — and do all of it without God. The moment spiritual disciplines become a system, you've created the conditions for a functional atheism that wears Christian clothing. The same applies to church management. You can run a really excellent church program and completely forget to invite God into it, because the system works fine without him.
Organised Messiness
Stu's phrase for what he's aiming at is organised messiness.
The organised part matters. A structured church service with clear shape and predictable ingredients is genuinely good — it serves the congregation, it honours people's time, it creates the conditions for people to encounter God without confusion getting in the way. Having clear meeting rhythms, good communication, reliable rosters and teams that function well is part of loving your congregation. Stu is not advocating for chaos.
The messiness part also matters, and it comes from two sources. The first is that church is a relational community of imperfect people in an imperfect world. Strings break on guitars. New preachers go long. People miss meetings. Conflict happens. Fatigue happens. These things are not failures of project management, they're the normal texture of human community, and a church leadership culture that can't make room for them will either exhaust itself trying to eliminate them or turn on the people who cause them.
The second source of messiness is more theological. God is relational. He is free. He does not respond to systems the way a vending machine responds to the right combination of buttons. You can run an evangelistic course really well and see no one come to faith. You can have a slightly shambolic Sunday service and see someone become a Christian. The harvest belongs to God, and the farmer's job is to plant, water and cultivate, with no guarantee of the outcome.
An over-realised eschatology treats the church as though it should already be what it will one day be in new creation: perfect, seamless, without sin or failure. The inevitable result is burnout. An under-realized eschatology shrugs at everything — God will do what God will do, so why bother planning? The result is laziness and an abdication of the stewardship God has entrusted to his people. Stu is aiming for the middle: a realized eschatology that says we are the people of God, in this place, at this time, with the brains and gifts God has given us — so let's work hard, pray hard, and hold the outcomes with open hands.
Isaac’s Leadership
Isaac is an Aboriginal pastor from Brewarrina, and one of Stu's closest friends in ministry. When Stu invited him down to Sydney not just to preach but to lead a whole service, he was deliberately creating a cross-cultural moment — an opportunity for a suburban Sydney Anglican congregation to experience church done very differently.
Isaac was caught in traffic from Parramatta. By the time he arrived, the service should have been well underway. The congregation — Anglo, middle-class, city-dwelling, accustomed to things starting on time — was restless. People were coming up to Stu asking what was going to happen. Some were checking their watches. A few were already calculating whether they could leave on the hour.
And then Isaac walked in. Not flustered, not apologetic. He picked up a guitar, walked to the front, and started singing an old hymn. Gradually, people found the words. Gradually, the room started to breathe.
Some people left when the hour was up. But many didn't. And the ones who stayed went away saying: “That was different. That was really good.”
The point isn't that Isaac's approach is better than Soul Revival's usual approach, or that running late is fine, or that structure doesn't matter. The point is that what Isaac brought was a model of church that had grace built into its architecture. There was no mechanism for failure, because there was no rigid expectation to fail against. There was just: we're here together, the Spirit is here, who wants to share something?
The discomfort the congregation felt wasn't about Isaac being disrespectful. It was about their own expectations — formed by a culture that has learned to measure respect by punctuality — meeting a different set of values. And sitting with that discomfort for 45 minutes was itself a formative experience.
Ministry Slide
The practical framework Stu describes for holding people and mission together is called ministry slide.
When someone joins a ministry team and starts missing meetings or seems to be struggling, the first response is not to treat it as a performance management issue. It's to have a conversation and say: you are more important to us than the team. Being in this team is about friendship with you, not just about what you produce. If you need to step back from meetings for a while, that's fine — you can stay on the team.
If the pattern continues, the conversation becomes: it seems like this particular ministry isn't quite working for you right now. Would you like to slide into something else? Or take a break altogether, knowing that the door is always open to slide back in?
The concept of ministry slide sits within a broader principle: the meeting is not primarily a project planning session. It's a gathering of friends who are on mission together. That means the meeting has two purposes running simultaneously — carrying one another's burdens, and planning the event. Both matter. And a culture that treats the relational purpose as inefficient noise that should be moved elsewhere will gradually lose the very thing that makes its ministry worth anything.
The language of grace runs through all of this. When someone doesn't show up, the starting assumption is: they had something more important to do. Not because accountability doesn't matter — it does. But because the starting posture of grace changes everything about how people experience being in the team.
It's the same instinct that the NRL has slowly learned in relation to Aboriginal players attending funerals. In some communities, the funeral of a cousin is not a discretionary event. It's one of the most important things you will do this year. An organisation that treats contract obligations as always trumping community obligations is not just being inflexible — it's failing to understand what it means to be human in a relational rather than transactional world.
Why the One Matters
Tony Payne once wrote a small editorial observing how absurd the Good Shepherd's arithmetic is. A 99% retention rate would be extraordinary by any measure. If you ended a year with 99% of your congregation still engaged, you'd be celebrating. The Good Shepherd leaves 99 to find the one. That's not good project management. That's not an efficient use of resources. That makes no sense at all — unless every single soul matters infinitely to Jesus, in which case it makes total sense.
The organic metaphors — farming, gardening, vineyards, harvest — are better for ministry than the corporate ones not because they're more biblical in some rigid proof-text sense, but because they carry the right assumptions. A farmer can plant and water and cultivate and still not get a harvest. That's not failure. That's the nature of farming. God causes the growth. Our job is faithfulness, not results.
Discussed on this episode
King Charles III addresses US Congress
Listen to the full conversation on the Shock Absorber podcast.
The Shock Absorber is a podcast for church leaders doing church a little differently. Next episode: the tangibles of church project management. Subscribe so you don't miss it. Email Joel at joel@shockabsorber.com.au, and join the Shock Absorber Network at shockabsorber.com.au.
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Soul Revival Church is an Anglican church in the Sutherland Shire and Ryde.