The Negotiation Paradox
The most serious issues cannot be handled seriously.

By Judson Edwards

The church traffics in the “big issues” of life. No small concerns or trivial pursuits for us. We’re all about the formidable S’s—Sin, Salvation, Stewardship, Servanthood, Sickness, and Sorrow. Those of us who lead churches are well aware that we handle these grave issues on a weekly, if not daily, basis.

Our tendency, naturally, is to approach these grave issues Seriously. Serious issues demand Serious attitudes, Serious discussions, Serious prayers. Every day we march to church with our “game faces on,” ready to be Serious.

Sadly, what this does is create an atmosphere of Seriousness and Sobriety that is the antithesis to good news. The writer Robert Louis Stevenson purportedly wrote in his journal one day, “Wonders of wonders! I have been to church today and am not depressed.” When we approach those formidable S’s with our Serious game face on, everyone gets depressed—including us!

And our attempts to handle serious issues seriously actually set in motion a destructive cycle that moves the church not toward commitment, but toward apathy. Edwin Friedman wrote:

Seriousness can be destructive. Seriousness is more than an attitude; it is a total orientation, a way of thinking embedded in constant, chronic anxiety. It is characterized by a lack of flexibility in response, a narrow repertoire of approaches, persistent efforts to try harder, an inability to change direction, and a loss of perspective and concentrated focus.¹

Our good-intentioned efforts to handle serious issues seriously only serves to perpetuate a chronically-anxious system that leaves everyone feeling a little bit like Longfellow. We can get to the point where we’re surprised when we return from a church committee meeting, or even a worship service, and don’t feel depressed. Stuck in seriousness, we’ve grown accustomed to church being a depressing experience.

That’s why the Negotiation Paradox needs to be in our minds (and in our committee meetings and worship services!): The most serious issues cannot be handled seriously.

As formidable as the S’s are, they do not yield to a serious approach. They are better approached playfully, quizzically, indirectly, and mysteriously. If we can ever learn to hand the serious S’s in those ways, we might succeed in making the gospel good news again.

But handling the big S’s in those ways does not come naturally, especially if you are by nature a “serious person.” Some years ago, in another book, I confessed my natural tendency to be a rather serious stick-in-the-mud:

I am not by nature a jolly good fellow. I am the shy, nervous type that likes solitude and privacy. Give me a choice between a crowd and a good book, and I will always choose the latter. No one has ever accused me of being the life of any party.

My idea of a good time is running three miles a day in the Texas heat. While normal people are eating chips and dip, and watching a ball game on television in an air-conditioned living room, I am jogging through the subdivision, panting and sweating with glee.

You get the picture. I tend to be a circumspect, antiseptic party-pooper. I preach joy better than I live it. Indeed, I write about the abundant life better than I live it too.²

When that is your normal way of approaching life, the Negotiation Paradox does not come easy. But I have learned through the years that seriousness is a dead-end street. Dealing with serious issues seriously perpetuates a negative cycle and leads to depression.

So, to counter my inclination toward too much seriousness, I try to remember the following four truths:

First, seriousness promotes stuck-ness. When Friedman said that a serious attitude “is characterized by a lack of flexibility in response, a narrow repertoire of approaches, persistent efforts to try harder, an inability to change direction, and a loss of perspective and concentrated focus,” he was really saying that seriousness promotes stuck-ness. When we get serious, we lose the capacity to think “outside the box.” Serious church leaders can no longer dream dreams and see visions.

Tom Peters, in his book The Pursuit of WOW!, told of a small company that adopted the following statement as one of its goals: “Have a collegial, supportive, yeasty, zany, laughter-filled environment where folks support one another, and politics is as absent as it can be in a human (i.e., imperfect) enterprise.”³ Wouldn’t that be a fine standard for churches to establish? Wouldn’t we be brighter light and zestier salt if we had a “collegial, supportive, yeasty, zany, laughter-filled” environment in our churches?

Granted, things would have to change considerably for that to happen. Most churches do fairly well in the “collegial, supportive” part of that statement but fail miserably in the “yeasty, zany, laughter-filled” part. But any church that wants to move, change, and explore is going to have to be yeasty, zany, and laughter-filled. Until we get out of our seriousness, we are doomed to staying stuck in sameness.

Second, hairballs are made to be orbited. A writer named Gordon McKenzie has written a yeasty, zany, laughter-filled book titled Orbiting the Giant Hairball. The subtitle of the book is “A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving with Grace.” It could also be subtitled “A Pastor’s Guide to Surviving with Grace.” See if any of this sounds anything like the church you serve:

Every new policy is another hair for the Hairball. Hairs are never taken away, only added. Even frequent reorganizations have failed  to remove hairs (people, sometimes; hairs, never). Quite the contrary, each reorganization seems to add a whole new layer of hairs. The Hairball grows enormous.

With the increase in the Hairball’s mass comes a corresponding increase in the Hairball’s gravity. There is such a thing as Corporate Gravity. As in the world of physics, so too in the corporate world: The gravitational pull a body exerts increases as the mass of that body increases. And, like physical gravity, it is the nature of Corporate Gravity to suck everything into the mass—in this case, into the mass of Corporate Normalcy.

The trouble with this is that Corporate Normalcy derives from and is dedicated to past realities and past successes. There is no room in the Hairball of Corporate Normalcy for original thinking or primary creativity. Resynthesizing past successes is the habit of the Hairball.⁴

Doesn’t that have a familiar ring to it? We have Ecclesiastical Gravity and Ecclesiastical Normalcy, too, and most definitely we have our fair share of Ecclesiastical Hairballs.

In fact, there is a foolproof way to determine how serious and stuck our church is: if we are focused on bylaws, policies, committee meetings and reports, staff evaluations, financial data, and other institutional concerns, we are probably both serious and stuck. We are focused more on paper than people.

Certainly, those institutional things must be tended, and I’m not pretending the modern church is not an institution. I just know that bylaws, policies, and reports don’t produce energy and life. They only add to the Hairball that eventually grows so large it takes all of our time just to maintain it. And they keep us from “original thinking and primary creativity.”

Third, the envelope is just as important as the letter. Linguistics experts tell us that communication involves two factors: the message and the metamessage. The message is the content of the communication; the metamessage is the process by which the communication is delivered. The message is the picture; the metamessage is the frame around the picture. The message is the letter; the metamessage is the envelope in which the letter is delivered.

From my experience, the envelope is every bit as vital as the letter. Those of us who preach weekly know the importance of the metamessage. We might have a brilliant sermon prepared for this particular Sunday. We have studied, prayed, and, wonder of wonders, everything has come together perfectly. We have conjured a homiletical masterpiece. The message, we feel confident, will be superb. But we also know that there are many other factors at work in communicating that message. Our homiletical masterpiece can still fall as flat as a day-old pancake if the metamessages don’t fall in line too.

What if we catch a cold between now and Sunday and have to sniffle our way through the sermon? What if we have a spat with our spouse on the way to church and enter the pulpit in a bad humor? What if the sound system malfunctions? What if the air conditioner goes out and people are sweltering? What if our words say Grace but our body language and tone of voice say Law? What if the music on Sunday is off-key and distracting?

None of those are content issues; they are process issues. But process is as crucial as content. When you think about all of the things that have to happen for effective communication to take place, we ought to do cartwheels every time we preach a sermon that actually connects.

The envelope is as important as the letter. That has huge implications for the way we “do church.” We can have a church council meeting about youth policies in an envelope that is serious, sober, and strident. Or we can have a church council meeting about youth policies in an envelope that is “collegial, supportive, yeasty, zany, and laughter-filled.”

The results of that council meeting will be determined not so much by the content to be discussed as by the emotional processes used to discuss that content. A meeting in a serious, sober, strident setting will inevitably produce bad results. A meeting in a zany, laughter-filled setting will inevitably produce new ideas and closer relationships. Same topic in both meetings, same letter, but very different envelopes—and very different results.

I’ve become so aware of the emotional process at work in meetings that I now dislike meeting people in my office at church and try to avoid meeting there whenever possible. When someone calls requesting a meeting with me, I nearly always suggest we get a cup of coffee at a local café or that we huddle over lunch. Meeting in my office says, “This is direct, personal, intimidating, and serious.” Meeting elsewhere says, “This is indirect, casual, friendly, and fun.” I like the second envelope much better.

If we are sensitive and creative, there are many “friendly envelopes” we can use at church to enhance communication—and to enhance relationships.

Fourth, playfulness is magical. When I talk about not treating serious issues seriously, I am not advocating that the pastor become a clown (though using humor is a fine way to be playful). I’m not suggesting that we buy joke books or that we decorate our study with “Three Stooges” wallpaper (though I do have an M&M dispenser on my desk to make my study less intimidating). I’m simply saying that seriousness creates a stifling atmosphere that is deadly for churches.

Playfulness, on the other hand, creates an atmosphere that is energizing for churches. Playfulness is an attitude of casual joy that becomes contagious. Any time a committee meeting takes on a playful tone, good things are going to happen. Any time a counseling session moves in the direction of playfulness, a breakthrough is possible. Any time a Sunday school class is zany and laughter-filled, the members of the class might be on the verge of learning something new. And let’s even go far enough to say that any time we can move beyond seriousness in our worship, someone present just might meet the Lord of the Dance that Sunday.

Earlier I mentioned the “Columbo Model” of pastoring, and one reason he is such a good role model is his playfulness. Columbo’s “envelope” is a playful one. True, he’s dealing with murder and mayhem, but the envelope is not serious. Columbo shows up in an old jalopy, wearing rumpled clothes, smoking a cigar, looking befuddled. No one takes him “seriously,” but his lack of seriousness makes him a good detective. He’s off-the-wall, creative, and wise, and it all comes packaged in a playful envelope.

But Columbo is not our best model for playfulness. Our best model is Jesus. Think about it: He made his entrance into the world as a fragile baby in a bed of straw. He grew up in a carpenter’s home and looks to all the world like a Nazarene hayseed.  He chose twelve common men to be his followers. He hung out with nonreligious types, even known sinners. He told quirky stories about coins and sheep and seeds. He went to parties and had a good time. He frustrated the righteous, religious people of his day by refusing to practice the legalistic rituals they espoused. He died on a cross between two crooks and then danced out of the tomb a free man.

I ask you: Does that sound like a respectable Messiah to you? It certainly wasn’t the kind of Messiah anyone was expecting. Jesus was too paradoxical and playful to be anybody’s idea of a Messiah. But, of course, we believe he was. And he stands as our best model for being at least a little paradoxical and playful ourselves.

The four ideas I’ve mentioned in this chapter are now lodged in my mind, but sometimes I forget them and revert to my serious, sober self. When I forget them, I get real serious. . .and real stuck. I start focusing on Hairballs. I forget how important the “envelope” always is. And I lose my playfulness and the sense of adventure playfulness always brings. In short, I become a serious Baptist pastor.

But when I remember that the most serious issues cannot be handled seriously and the four ideas that go with that paradox, I can sit loose and enjoy being a pastor. Unlike Stevenson, I can go to church and expect to have a good time.

 ¹ Edwin Friedman, Generation to Generation (New York: Guilford, 1985), 50.

² Judson Edwards, Regaining Control of Your Life (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1989), 8.

³ Tom Peters, The Pursuit of WOW! (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 18.

⁴ Gordon McKenzie, Orbiting the Giant Hairball (New York: Viking, 1996), 31.

—From The Leadership Labyrinth by Judson Edwards