If you’re a sports fan, you might be familiar with the difference between failure and defeat.
Your team can work hard all year, practice well, come together to execute their plays—and still lose in the championship. Or your team can be the kind where it’s clear right from the outset that they are not going to make the playoffs, who struggle to muster the energy to get suited up and out of the locker room, and whose players are more focused on their next contract and not their next game. The first team has been defeated. There was simply a better team out there. The second team has failed. It hasn’t even really tried. There may be agony but there’s no shame in playing confidently and losing. What is problematic is being unable to even enter the arena, or playing the game so poorly you might as well never have suited up.
If you are in ministry today it can be very easy to feel like a failure. Lots of us are working hard to put together interesting programs, preach compelling sermons, and lead engaging worship. Yet sometimes these efforts just don’t gain traction. People don’t show up. They stare off into the middle distance distractedly, or glance at their phones too often. In my experience, we tend to describe this as failure.
The trouble with thinking that we have failed in ministry is that it places tremendous weight on our human action. But the current state of the church is not simply a result of human action. It is also a result of the societal structures in which we minister. Christians are not the only ones trying to form people in a way of life. There are other powers that may be stronger than our efforts at formation. It is time to reframe our conversation in the church from one of failure to defeat. We are struggling to transmit our message from one generation to another because there are powerful structural forces that make it less likely for people to consider religious affiliation and church membership in the first place.
In my view, the dominant structural forces that shape us today are economic. We live amid economic structures that propound a damaging set of values that are antithetical to the Christian gospel. It is hard to proclaim a gospel that declares our salvation is not dependent on our action but on God’s, while at the same time living in an environment that incessantly proclaims that we are to be judged by our ability, our performance, and our deeds. It is hard to form people into an economy of giving and receiving if the dominant messages we receive are that we are to understand ourselves primarily as consumers who should find meaning through consumption. It is challenging to form people into a Christian community that meets for worship and service when labour practices of the gig economy, “side hustles,” and algorithmically designed work schedules prevent your community from gathering together on a regular basis. It is next to impossible to teach people that there are values independent of price—values like truth, love, or hope—when the market has taught us that the only value that matters is paying the lowest price of all. None of this is to make excuses for Christians. But if we are serious about the future of Christian witness then we need to think not just about what we are doing but about the structural context in which we find ourselves.
When Jesus was hanging on a cross, he, his good news, and his kingdom sure seemed like they had been defeated. But what Jesus on the cross was not was a failure. He had, in sports parlance, left it all on the field. He had lived confidently, spoken with authority, confronted the powers directly, and the powers had won. But the great good news of the Christian gospel is found in precisely this: defeat is not the end. Victory is coming. Jesus was defeated but that does not mean we need to be defeatist. Quite the opposite.
If we cannot see the powers and structures of this world that are working against Christian witness, then our best efforts will simply not be good enough. A defeatist cynicism will be not far behind. But there is another path. That path is to see with clarity those powers that obstruct God’s reign and then cultivate communities in Christ that form people to live in hope, resist the powers of this world, and be a foretaste of the kingdom Jesus proclaimed and enacted. Yes, these powers shape and affect even us who proclaim that we live by the values of a different kingdom. Yes, we will almost certainly be defeated at times in our efforts to form people in the life of the reign of God. But that does not mean we have failed. It simply means that in that defeat God is waiting and working to bring forth new life in the way God has always done.
Canon Jesse Zink is the author of Faithful, Creative, Hopeful: Fifteen Theses for Christians in a Crisis-Shaped World (Church Publishing, 2024), from which this essay is adapted.
