It’s been a whole two weeks since I posted last- do I dare say this is becoming a regular thing?!
I’m not sure how much of my own personality comes through these (admittedly few and far between) posts, but I’m somewhat of a geek. I’m not crazy about pocket protectors, role playing or World of Warcraft, but I’m a tech fiend, to be sure. The love of all things blooping and beeping was instilled in me as a youngster by my dad, who would bring home discarded computers from his workplace for me to deconstruct, reconstruct, and just generally tinker with until I had them humming along exactly like I wanted.
That being said, my dad’s no slouch either, and so together we’re involved in bringing a huge technological innovation forward. Think “Facebook”, here. Being devout Christians and committed members of our church congregation, we’ve immediately seen the ways our innovation can help in the spreading of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and we had a natural testing ground for the technology. It’s a win-win: the church gets in on the ground floor of a new, exciting technology, and we get a place to put it through its paces.
Since I can’t reveal any details about the tech, let’s just say we figured out how to put the message every Sunday on billboards all over the country, for very cheap or free, in many cases.
So we started testing. At first just with very rural billboards, visible only to our partners in the area… Here’s the rub- the leaders of the church weren’t consulted, other than to ask, “Can we put up a part of the service on a billboard?” The answer to that particular question (if you’re not asking “why would you want to do that?!?!?”) is always going to be “Sure, if you want to.”
Note some very serious omissions there- no mention of a company being involved, no mention of the benefit to the church, no mention that we are an integral part of said company and no mention of the fact that this will be a product we are planning on bringing to market for profit in the future.
This all came to a head when, predictably, some leaders who are known for overestimating themselves and their areas of responsibility were alerted to the fact that we were promoting the church on billboards, and were miffed. Did we use any of their images? Is there a liability issue for using the church’s logo without permission?
This “spooked” the church administrator, who then sent out a group email to ask these questions on behalf of the questioner, who remained anonymous (but only in name- it’s already clear who it was).
From my vantage point, there are two issues here. First, the fact that the nature of the project was not made clear to those who have been placed in a position to make such decisions on behalf of the body at large, and that the church admin decided to pursue this publicly on behalf of an anonymous member instead of approaching myself or my father privately to discuss the issue in person before involving anyone else.
Regarding the first issue:
I’m firmly of the belief that the whole truth should have been made known to key leaders (the “big dogs”, so to speak) prior to embarking on the use of any of the church’s properties, precisely to head off any kind of challenge like this. There’s a phrase that we can adapt to our use in this situation- “When the cat is away, the mice can play”. In the absence of the whole truth, a plausible theory or an outright lie are considered as equally valid, because no one knows exactly what the truth is. Troublemakers know this and use this to their advantage, taking cheap shots and questioning characters under the guise of “making sure the church isn’t adversely affected”. “Mice can play”, indeed. Knowing this going in, you make the pastor and admin aware of the whole truth, and you ask them for discretion so as not to let too many technical details out of the bag. Then the mice can play, but they don’t know the cat is lurking just behind the curtain.
Regarding the second issue:
The admin was absolutely wrong to have responded the way he did, and the matter should have been brought to us privately. The state of the matter is just as attributable to that decision on his part as it would be to the first issue, in my opinion. He needs to be confronted and the issue needs to be made clear that he was wrong in pursuing that line of questioning in group email form when we were very accessible in private.
The dubrub (double rub)- my dad absolutely, positively, refuses to share the whole truth with the key leaders, and has decided to take offense that there is even the insinuation of wrongdoing or intentional misleading on his part, and that the leadership decided to respond in the manner they did. I tried explaining that the way you respond when questioned matters almost as much as what you were trying to do in the first place- if you take offense and call the whole thing off, you’re likely to be perceived as doing something wrong in the first place if you refuse to provide more detail as to what your actual intentions were. He took this to mean that I was accusing him of doing something wrong, which is just a continuation of his strategy in general- ask him a simple, non-accusatory question, and he blows it out of proportion in order to keep it from being a part of any kind of honest discussion. He doesn’t want a discussion, and he doesn’t want a resolution- he tried to pull a fast one without having to answer any tough questions, and when tough questions were asked, he was prepared to drop the whole thing in the hopes that his willingness to “cut the baby in half” (a la wise king Solomon) would force the questioner to flinch first and allow him to continue unquestioned.
Except, I kind of messed that up for him by getting involved and insisting that everyone be brought into the fold, and that everyone be made to know exactly who all the parties involved are and what all of their intentions may be. Now my dad and I are fighting, when all I’m trying to do is help, and all because he couldn’t even be honest with me about what he was trying to do. Look, if we were trying to pull a fast one, the way one might negotiate with a used car salesman, then I should have been made aware of the strategy at large instead of twisting in the wind, trying to make up my own mind about how to proceed.
…And there’s no tidy resolution here, dear reader. I’m trying to understand, I’m trying not to let this make me lose respect for my father, who has never done anything to make me lose respect for him in the past. But this is the sort of thing he would be unequivocally in agreement with me, if it hadn’t been him on the other side. He has always taught me, at least I think, that business and church are separate, and when he pulled a grizzled veteran corporate move in the Sanctuary, I got deked just as much as all the rest of the church leaders.
At this point, all I can hope to achieve in the situation is for the whole trial relationship to disintegrate with the church, and I’ll have to walk around with a besmirched reputation at the church for having been involved with the whole endeavor. Not because we were doing anything wrong, but like a criminal in court, because we plead “not guilty” without offering anything in the way of an explanation, and I wasn’t about to be the snitch that sold out his partner in not-really-crime-but-boy-it-sure-looks-like-it-if-you-don’t-know-what’s-going-on.
Because if there’s one lesson I’m absolutely positive my father taught me, it’s that family comes first, and I’m happily loyal to a fault to this day. But a lesson life taught me, so brilliantly portrayed in the motion picture powerhouse “Running Scared”, is that “Nobody Knows Nobody”. And that’s something the wise king Solomon, along with Jesus the Christ, really should have known from day one.
