Transformational Over Transactional

I’m a big sports fan. In my downtime while at home you can often find me watching a game of some sort. While baseball is by far my favorite sport, possibly to a fault, I enjoy just about any sport. I would have to say that football would be next in line behind baseball, especially NCAA football. It does’t take much to realize that the landscape of college football has shifted quite a bit as of late. With NIL (name, image, likeness) deals, the transfer portal seemingly going crazy, and the pay for play conversations that are happening makes it feel more like professional than amateur sports. Let me be clear on my opinion, I believe college athletes should be compensated, especially when it comes to NIL. Organizations, schools, boosters, and the like have made a lot of money on the backs of these hardworking individuals and they should receive their fair share. I do believe with NIL, as well as the other things mentioned, there will need to be more oversight created as this process moves forward.

A while back I was watching College Game Day on ESPN. If you’re not familiar with the program, they travel to a different college location week to week and throughout the show they talk through college football, anything big that may be happening throughout the sport, as well as other anecdotes and activities. I find it to be a well crafted and an entertaining show. During this particular episode, they begin talking about the transfer portal. Nick Saban, the former football coach at the University of Alabama, spoke up and said something along the lines of, too many of these transfers are looking at these decisions with transactional mindset and we need to shift back to a transformational one. I’m no quoting him here because this isn’t an exact quote.

A quick side note, I live way down south in the bayou. You know, Louisiana so by default that makes me an LSU Tigers fan. For many down here, Saban is either viewed as the one that got away or the enemy. He coached at LSU and had a national championship with them. He left shortly after to try his hand at a short-lived NFL coaching job but when he returned, he traded the purple and gold for the crimson of Alabama. I’m not necessarily calling this a rivalry, although many do, but let’s just say the two fanbases don’t get along well.

No matter your views on Saban, he’s a great coach, a great recruiter, and a brilliant tactician when it comes to the game of football. Throughout his last few years of coaching and still now as a pundit, he’s been very outspoken about his views on NIL and the transfer portal and believes without some governance these things will cause problems for college football. When he made the transformational over transactional statement on College Game Day that morning, I stood up out of my chair, and with a resounding, deep from the gut, declared “YES!” I’m sure you have moments in your life where someone has said something that just defined or clarified something you were feeling. This was one of those moments for me. My next thought was, what if people treated church like this. If you’ve been in the church world for five minutes or fifty years, you surely can see the irony of this thought. An argument could be made that the modern western church had the original transfer portal. But why and what can be done about it?

There are some legitimate reasons that people move churches but I would argue that many that do the church hop aren’t for these reasons. A little squabble here or a disagreement there and rather than working through things biblically, we take the easy way out.

For the remainder of this post, I want to speak to the leaders of churches and ministries navigating this “church transfer portal” but if you find yourself as one who has or is considering this jump, I pray there’s something for you to glean from as well.

First of all, it’s really easy to doubt things or even ourselves when someone leaves and while it’s easy for someone like me to say don’t do that, it’s a struggle nonetheless. We ask questions like, “could have said or done something differently?” This is a legitimate concern that should take you one of two directions. One, you realize that you may have said or done something that offended in someway, even if it were unintentional. If that’s the case, the obvious thing to do is have a conversation with them where you own and apologize any wrong doing or misunderstanding that may have occurred. If you are 1% to blame, own your 1%. The second thing is, they just may not care for what you have to say. To this I’ll quote Paul in his letter the the Galatians. Galatians 1:10 says,

“For am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ.”*

For one seeking to have their ideas or life justified but the church, your words may be offensive to someone when it doesn’t. I must remind you at this point, you didn’t offend. In college sports, players seem to often transfer when they’ve believed something other than what they’re being told now, whether they were originally told something differently or not. What makes us think it would be any different for us in church?

Another significant reason college athletes seem to hit the transfer portal is, they are not getting enough playing time or maybe the “start” they think they deserve. I’m experience some of this in my time in ministry as well. Someone wants to serve in student ministry or on the worship team but don’t want to go through the process our church has in place to get them to that place. The term, “trust the process” is thrown around in sports a lot and probably needs to be used in churches a bit more. Our church governance has a system in place that takes people on the journey to where they’d like to be. In the rare case it’s the spotlight they seek, they usually won’t want to journey through our process to get there. If you don’t have systems and procedures in place to help prevent this, I would highly encourage you to write and implement some.

Lastly, when someone decides to leave your church for another, be Kingdom minded. In college sports, I can understand being disappointed or even frustrated for an athlete to transfer to a conference rival but that does’t apply in churches. The first thing we have to move past with this is, other bible believing churches are neither your competition nor your rivals. They are partners in the gospel. When someone from your ministry decides to attend one of those bodies, what if we blessed them instead of questioning them? To think we are right and another bible believing church is wrong is quite arrogant if I say so myself.

There’s no easy or “clean” way to do this so for whatever reason they decide to go, let’s do it with as much grace and love as possible. Make sure they know you are still for them and in their corner when it comes to life. I recognize there are many other reasons people move churches, and quite a few are legitimate, but I don’t have time to get into every single instance. So the takeaway, bless them wherever they land and pray God does incredible things in them and through them in their new body, wherever it may be.

If you are the one considering making a move, make sure it’s transformational not simply transactional. If you’re not sure what that looks like, that’s fine, but maybe hang around a little longer and find out. Trust the process as they say. Keep leading well, stay the course! You have what it takes!

Eric FosheeOctober 21, 2024Comment