We Are Not Guinea Pigs
The Problem with “Opportunities to Fail”
Last week our church went on an outing that we take each June, a kind of family fun day. The last few years we’ve went to a pet farm relatively close to us, and it’s a great way for the kids to play and see their pastor pet a snake and be very uncomfortable. You read that right, there is at least one snake in Ireland!
This year though one of the highlights was, as a fully grown adult.
I got told off.
Surprising I know!
While chatting near the baby rabbits, I heard one of the staff that the baby rabbits could be lifted. Some of the kids (and adults) wanted to pet one, so I hopped the 2ft barrier and grabbed a rabbit, while everyone flocked to pet him (or her), the staff member approached and said that this was a job only for staff. I sheepishly set the little bunny back in, while the church kids were in shock, and my wife doubled up in laughter. As I set the rabbit back in though I realised something strange, well strange to a city boy that had just been shouted at for wrangling a rabbit. The baby rabbits were surrounded by about 10 guinea pigs, and yet no one had asked to pet them. In this moment I had a flashback to a talk I gave at a conference last summer on leadership. Myself and my co-presenter talked about testing emerging leaders, and afterwards someone came up to me and said, “yeah, but no one wants to be a guinea pig!” I grabbed by Notes app, typed that phrase in, and promptly forgot about it. Until I was embarrassed by a 16 year-old girl at a pet farm.
God indeed does move in mysterious ways!
Many years ago, I heard someone talk about creating “opportunities to fail” in church life. I nodded along because it sounded right enough. Nobody learns to preach without preaching a few semi-heretical sermons. Nobody learns pastoral care without occasionally saying too much, too little, or the right thing in a slightly clumsy way. This was my, and many others I’m sure, path into ministry. Have a go, see what happens, see if you have what it takes! Now we can debate that as an approach, but it has served the church well for many centuries. However, if a church says it wants to develop people but never lets them try anything until they are already competent, it is not developing people. It is waiting for ready-made leaders to arrive from somewhere else. That rarely happens, and when it does, we often discover they were formed somewhere else by people who took risks we were unwilling to take. I’ve written about this here if you want to read more about it.
Still, the phrase has niggled at me. “Opportunities to fail” can sound a bit more generous than what we might be doing. It can also sound like something from a laboratory. Like where I usually consider the place of guinea pigs to be. That’s what clicked from when that young leader made the comment last summer. Now I understand why they perhaps shirked that label. We test things on guinea pigs, mice, and other small animals because they are useful but not precious to us. That is the uncomfortable moral reality. The experiment has to happen somewhere, and most people would rather it happen to them than to us. The little cute animal absorbs the risk, and we receive the result. I am not writing here about scientific ethics, and I am not pretending to have a rounded answer to every question that image raises in regard to cute little animals. What I am interested in the image because it exposes something ugly that can creep into church leadership culture. We say we want people to try. We say we want emerging leaders to grow. We say failure is part of learning. Then someone fails and we find out what we actually believe.
Sometimes we discover that we never really wanted disciples to grow through failure. We wanted successful experiments. When someone ‘has a go’ and it goes awry, what happens next? That is where a church’s theology jumps from statement of faith, to what are we going to actually do. What kind of people are we trying to form.
Grace in Theory, Legalism Under the Surface
“It is possible to talk a lot about grace and still be a legalist.”
I wrote this line in 2013 and found it this week on Facebook memories. I also regularly find a lot of other rubbish I posted in my past, but that’s a story for another day! When I talk about grace and legalism I do not mean legalism in the sense that has been outed throughout history, where someone believes they can earn salvation by works. Most evangelical churches know how to reject that quite easily. We can preach Ephesians 2 with wonderful conviction. We can quote, “By grace you have been saved through faith.” We can explain that justification is not based on our performance. We can do all of that and still build a church culture where a person’s place in the community depends on whether they remain useful and impressive. That is the kind of legalism that hides under the surface. We might not always have words for it, but we can know it when we feel it. We know whether failure will be treated as part of discipleship or as evidence that we never belonged in the first place.
The Christian faith, at least how the Bible models it, doesn’t permit us to turn people into experiments. Peter is probably the clearest example, though we have heard the story so often that we can forget about how ‘unsuitable’ in our leadership values he really was. Jesus warns him before his denial happens...
“Simon, Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you, that he might sift you like wheat,” he says, “but I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail. And when you have turned again, strengthen your brothers” (Luke 22:31–32).
Jesus does not pretend Peter is stronger than he is. Peter is about to be sifted. That word always gave me chills! He is about to discover that his courage isn’t up to the same level as his confidence. He will deny Jesus out loud, under pressure, near the fire, challenged by a young girl, while the Lord he loves is being led toward death. Yet Jesus speaks of Peter’s return before Peter falls.
“When you have turned again.”
The failure is going to happen in Peter’s near future, but it is not allowed to become Peter’s whole future. Jesus has already placed Peter’s collapse inside a larger story, one including repentance, forgiveness, restoriation and usefulness once again. Not usefulness in the cheap sense, as if Peter simply needs to be put back on the church rota. Usefulness in the sense of a proud man who has learned that he is not the hero of the story, albeit in a way that most of us pray never happens to us.
That is not how many churches handle failure though. We often know how to distance, punish, downgrade, or quietly shuffle someone out the back door due to “differences in vision.” Some of those things may be true, and even necessary for certain situations. There are also failures that require removal from ministry. There are sins that have real-life victims. There are patterns that make some people’s leadership unsafe. I want to say this in case we think that this word ‘failure’ can be argued away as part of a discipleship journey, or a gifted leader ‘making a mistake.’ A church that waves away serious sin in the name of grace is not actually being gracious. It is being dangerous. But there is another danger too. A church can be so afraid of mess that it can treat every failure as contamination, or see every mistake as a failure. It can become the kind of place where restoration is affirmed on a statement of faith but almost never practised in ways that cost anything. Jesus restores Peter with painful tenderness. In John 21, beside another fire, He asks him three times, “Do you love me?” This must have hurt. The questions press into the wounds that Peter was obviously still carrying. Peter is grieved over his betrayal, but Jesus is not pretending his denials did not happen. Then he says, “Feed my sheep.” Peter will not lead as the man who never failed, but as the man who was prayed for, exposed, humbled, forgiven, and sent back to strengthen his brothers by Jesus, the One he had betrayed.
We Are To Make Disciples, Not Do Experiments
The answer then is to disciple people compassionately enough that failure isn’t the end. That means that primarily our expectations for people must be clearer, and our response to failure more Christlike. Feedback must be kinder and more direct. Responsibility should be given in proportion to a person’s character, not merely ability or gifting. The qualifications for elders in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1, as much as we have debated them around who can do what, are mercy for the church. Character matters. Reputation matters. Self-control matters. Home life matters. Gentleness matters. Moreso, those qualifications should make us serious about the work of spiritual formation.
We see that clearly in the Gospels in the lives of the Disciples. They did not arrive ready-made Apostles. They misunderstood Jesus repeatedly. They argued about greatness. They tried to stop little kids coming to him. James and John wanted fire from heaven to torch Samaritans. Peter rebuked Jesus and then denied him. Thomas doubted. The group slept when they should have prayed. Peter even chopped someone’s ear off for dear’s sake! If most of us had been designing a leadership pipeline, we would have flagged these guys as concerning by week three. But Jesus did not ignore their sin, He corrected them, sometimes sharply, but He kept them close and kept going. That closeness is one of the things missing from some of our churches. I understand the desire, we want to hand someone a job or responsibility in order to ‘get it off our plate’ and then can get frustrated when the person doesn’t do it the way we want. That isn’t their issue, it’s ours. We haven’t trained them, we’ve handed them a ministry grenade and then prayed that it doesn’t explode.
At that point, this guinea pig problem appears. The person we choose carries the risk of our system and decision. They are put into an experiment that we called ‘opportunity’. When it works, we are encouraged. When it fails, they absorbed the shame.
It is in the Gospel that we have the process for this. At the cross, God does not treat human failure as small. Sin is judged with wrath. Evil is not shrugged away and explained away. But the judgment falls on Christ, and mercy is given to people who have no clean record to present. But Paul’s words are a balm for our souls “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). No condemnation does not mean no consequences. It means as a believer our future is not finally decided by our worst moment.
So yes, let people try. Let the church be a place where disciples are formed through practice, correction, repentance, and encouragement. But do not create guinea pigs. Do not create situations where people are useful for the experiment and then abandoned when the experiment fails. Jesus restores failures. Not all in the same way. Not without truth. Not without a bit of messy-ness. But He restores. That is the family history of the church. Failure is not supposed to be hidden, it has to become one of the places where the Gospel is actually believed.