Relational and Responsive: The Tangibles of Church Project Management

15 May

THE SHOCK ABSORBER

Millionaires and the Met

Sarah Paulson attended the Met Gala with a dollar bill as a blindfold. The message, presumably, was about wealth inequality — a protest gesture aimed at the billionaires funding the event, or the system that produces them, or both. The backlash was predictable: a film star with a net worth in the millions protesting the concentration of wealth while wearing a $100,000 dress is a particular kind of irony that's hard to miss.

Stu traces the tradition of socially conscious art back through Bob Dylan's protest songs, through the union movement literature of early 20th century Australia, to writers like Katharine Susannah Prichard who wrote from genuine working-class experience. The tradition is real and has produced work that mattered. But there's a difference between an artist speaking out of their own experience of inequality and a celebrity performing concern about inequality at one of the most expensive social events in the world. The medium, as McLuhan would say, is the message.

What's more interesting is the question that sits underneath all of it: in a world of growing inequality, what is the church's actual response? Not performative, not political, but structural and relational. What does a community that genuinely levels things look like?

Galatians 3 and the $7 Meal

In Galatians 3:28, there is no longer Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female — all are one in Christ Jesus. The distinctions don't disappear when you become a Christian. Your gender, your ethnicity, your socioeconomic class are all still real. But none of them confer advantage or create disadvantage in your access to God or to the community he is building.

This is the theological foundation. The third-place sociology adds another layer: one of the defining markers of a genuine third place is the levelling effect. A space where your status outside doesn't follow you in. Where the wealthiest person and the person on welfare are both just people having a cup of tea and a conversation.

The practical outworking at Soul Revival is deliberately concrete. Meals cost $7 per person, $28 for a family. Across the road at the local shopping centre, you'd struggle to feed one person for $28. The price is set at cost, no profit, no surplus, so that nobody is priced out. If you can't afford it, no problem.

Families have quietly taken home leftovers to eat during the week because they can't otherwise afford meals. Camp subsidies exist so that no family has to tell their child they can't go on camp because of money. These aren't programs with names and brochures. They're structural choices about how the community operates that make the Galatians vision concrete rather than aspirational.

It's also worth noting, as Stu does, that Paul's letter to the Corinthians includes some of his sharpest words about a church that had got this wrong. The wealthy arriving early to the Lord's Supper, eating all the food and getting drunk, while the servants arrived after work to find nothing left — Paul calls it a failure to discern the body of Christ. The gathering of God's people around God's table is not a context in which the ordinary stratifications of society are simply reproduced. It is meant to be the interruption of those stratifications.

The Systems Question

How do you actually run a church well across all of this? The practical answer involves systems, and the conversation gets usefully specific.

ChurchSuite is Soul Revival's primary platform for managing rosters, communications and team coordination. It's been pushed beyond its original design in various places — jerry-rigged to do things it was never built for — but it works. The principle is simple: if you're going to lead a weekend gathering well, you need to know that the people you've delegated to have accepted, will show up, and will tell you if they can't. That's not bureaucracy. It's love for your congregation expressed through preparation.

The communication challenge in an all-age, all-stage intergenerational church is real and slightly comic. Different generations live on different platforms. If it's not on WhatsApp, it didn't happen — for some people. Others use Facebook Messenger but don't have Facebook accounts anymore. Some people never check email. Tim's daughter deletes all her alert emails in one swipe. And in Soul Revival's Miranda congregation there are people in their 90s who receive a printed newsletter each week because they don't have a computer.

The Shock Absorber principle applies here too. You can't take on every new platform every time a generation changes its preferences — a shock absorber that's too flexible will break. But you can't insist everyone use email forever — that's too rigid. The goal is to be listening, to be responsive, and to be building bridges rather than drawing lines. The pigeon budget, unfortunately, remains unallocated.

How to Say No to a Good Idea

One of the most useful things in the episode is the conversation about how to handle good ideas that don't quite fit.

The Shock Absorber framework applies directly here. When someone arrives from another church with a practice that worked well there — a prayer night, a particular event format, a structure for meetings — the two failure modes are obvious. You can just say yes to everything, ending up with a pick-and-mix vision of church that has no coherent theology or strategy underneath it. Or you can say no to everything, treating your existing structures as beyond question and leaving people feeling unheard and irrelevant.

The mature middle ground is a conversation — between the new idea, the church's theological convictions, its strategic priorities, and its traditions. Matt Redmond's triangle from the early Soul Revival days still holds: Bible at the top, tradition at the bottom left, cultural change and new ideas at the right. All three are in conversation, none of them automatically overrides the others.

The example Tim works through is someone noticing that the church doesn't seem to have much dedicated prayer outside of services, and suggesting a regular prayer night. The response isn't no. It's: we hear that, we value prayer, here's what we're already doing that you might not have noticed, and here's how we're thinking about building something new that fits within the structures we have rather than adding another night to an already full calendar. Building a bridge to a new reality — so that if it works, you've gained something, and if it doesn't, you can come back to where you were.

Stu tells the cautionary tale of the bands. Soul Revival invested significantly in Christian musicians over the years, giving them space to develop and grow. The unintended consequence was that when those bands started playing pub gigs on Saturday nights, they naturally invited their Soul Revival friends — which pulled mature Christians out of the ministry on the one night of the week the community was most active. The band wasn't doing anything wrong. The system had just produced an outcome nobody anticipated. Building a bridge means you can notice these things and adjust.

Teams Not Tasks

The concept that ties the episode together is teams not tasks. It sounds like a management principle. It's actually a theological conviction.

The foundation is friendship as an ecclesial category, one of the recurring themes on the Shock Absorber. The church is not primarily a task-completion organisation. It is a community of people who are friends with Jesus and therefore friends with each other. That friendship is not instrumental, it's not a strategy for producing better outputs. It's an inbuilt value that comes prior to any task.

What this means practically is that when you gather for a ministry meeting, you're gathering as friends first. There's levity. There are jokes. There's food sometimes. There's sharing of life. And if someone falls apart in the middle of the agenda, you stop and pray with them and cancel the plans for the weekend if necessary — because that was the most important thing happening in the room.

Stu still remembers a meeting 25 years ago where that happened. Someone poured out their heart. The whole meeting turned into prayer. The event didn't get planned. And he has no memory of dozens of efficient meetings where everything got done on time. The one he remembers is the one where the team was more important than the task. It’s saying “you mean more to us than what you can give us”. Not: we need your output, and we'll be relational about extracting it. But: we're actually here to be friends, and the ministry we're doing together is an expression of that friendship — not the other way around.

Tim's important caveat is worth preserving: teams not tasks doesn't mean tasks don't matter. It doesn't mean the detail-oriented, task-focused people in your team are wrong to be that way. They're gifted by God, and their capacity to bring order and follow-through to a community of relational people is a gift the community needs. The danger is sanctifying a particular personality type as the ideal, whether that's the spontaneous relational person or the efficient organised person. Both are needed. Both are honoured in a team where friendship is the foundation.

The Mammoth Meeting

For most of human history, we gathered around a fire to discuss what to do tomorrow — go hunt a mammoth, fix the broken spear, plant something new. There was no to-do lists, no action plans, no follow-up emails. They just talked. Someone said what they thought. Someone else said what they thought. They figured it out together, and then they went and did it.

Industrialisation introduced the meeting as a production mechanism. The agenda. The actions. The minutes. The follow-up. These tools are not bad. They're often genuinely helpful. But they carry their own message and the message is that the purpose of gathering is to produce outputs.

The church gathers for a different reason. The purpose of gathering is to be together as God's people, to hear from him and to speak to him, to carry one another's burdens, and to go out into the world as his witnesses. Everything else — the rosters, the systems, the ChurchSuite notifications, the communication platforms — exists to serve that gathering, not to define it.

Organised messiness with an element of grace. Teams not tasks. Relational and responsive.

Discussed on this episode

Francis Schaeffer — The Great Evangelical Disaster

Andy Crouch — Culture Making
Robert Greene — The 48 Laws of Power

ChurchSuite — churchsuite.com

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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