Baseball is a team sport, but it is basically an
accumulation of individual activities. Throwing a strike, hitting a line
drive or fielding a grounder, is primarily an individual achievement. The
team that performs the most individual tasks well probably will win the
game.
Soccer is not like that. In soccer, almost no task,
except the penalty kick and a few others, is intrinsically individual.
Soccer is a game about occupying and controlling space. If you get the
ball and your teammates have run the right formations, and structured the space
around you, you'll have three or four options on where to distribute the
ball. If the defenders have structured their formations to control the
space, then you will have no options. Even the act of touching the ball
is not primarily defined by the man who is touching it ---- it is defined by
the context created by all the other players.
Soccer is a collective game, a team game, and everyone has
to play intelligently the part which has been assigned to him or her. In
last summer's World Cup matches, Brazil wasn't clobbered by Germany because the
quality of the individual players was so much worse. They got slaughtered
because they did a very poor job of controlling space. A German player
could touch the ball, even close to the Brazilian goal, and he had ample room
to make the kill.
Many of us at CPC spend our days thinking we are playing
baseball. But, much of the time we are really playing soccer. We
think we individually choose what path to take in getting involved in CPC
church life. However, what we perceive as "life at CPC" is, in
fact, the context created by all the other CPC members. It seems
analogous to the soccer team's attempt to control space on the playing field
---- our church members define the context, but they do it for proactive
purposes, not to put up a defense.
The creation of church context happens through at
least three avenues. First, there is "contagion." People absorb
memes, ideas and behaviors from each other, the way they catch a cold. If
your church friends are active in care-giving, for example, you are likely to
be similarly active. If your church neighbors play fair, you are likely
to play fair. We all live within distinct moral ecologies. The overall
environment influences what we think of as "normal" behavior without
our being much aware of it.
It can work in the opposite direction, as well. If the
majority of the congregation wishes to take a particular action opposed by a
minority of members, the latter may well leave the church and worship elsewhere
because such conflict will be absent.
Then there is the structure of our social
network. People with vast numbers of acquaintances have more church job
opportunities than people with fewer but deeper friendships. Most
organizations have structural holes, gaps between two departments or
disciplines. If you happen to be interested in a leadership position
where you can make a contribution to the social network, your visibility may
bring an invitation to serve as an Elder, Deacon or in other decision-making
roles.
Innovation is hugely shaped by the structure of an
organization at any moment. Individuals in Silicon Valley are creative
now because of the fluid structure of failure and recovery. Broadway was
said to be incredibly creative in the 1940's and 1950's because it was a fluid
industry in which casual acquaintances ended up collaborating. If the
structure of an organization becomes more rigid over time, often that change in
structure will lessen creativity.
Finally, there is the power of the extended mind. Our
consciousness is shaped by the people around us. Each close friend you
have brings out a version of yourself that you could not bring out on your
own. Such close friends may inspire us with new ideas, or help energize
us to do something we would never have attempted on our own.
Once we acknowledge that in our life at CPC we are playing
soccer, not baseball, a few things become clear. First, awareness of the landscape
reality in CPC life is extremely important. It means being sensitive
to the full width of the CPC environment, feeling where the flow of events is
going. Being an effective CPC member is in practice perceiving more than
just conscious reasoning.
Second, predictive models will be less useful.
Baseball is wonderful for statisticians. In each "at bat" there
is a limited range of possible outcomes. Activities like soccer are not
as easy to render statistically, because the relevant spatial structures are
harder to quantify. Likewise, at CPC, many initiatives may quietly be
undertaken which ultimately do not take root, even though they looked promising
at the outset.
Finally, soccer is said to be like a 90-minute anxiety dream
---- one of those frustrating dreams when you're trying to get somewhere but
something is always in the way. Is this yet another way soccer is like a
life of faith at CPC? Our life of faith may appear at first to be an
individual endeavor. However, as with soccer, at CPC we continue to seek
a collective involvement that enriches our lives,whether we are observing from
the stands or playing on the field.
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These thoughts are brought to you by CPC's Adult
Spiritual Development Team, hoping to encourage you to pursue some personal
spiritual growth this winter at CPC.
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