What is Failure?

This is a very late blog post today as I have spent about half the day feeling quite ill and miserable. I ate something with cream in it and having a fairly mild milk protein allergy it has resulted in thumping headaches and general yuckiness most of the day. To top the day off James seems to have come down with chicken pox. So maybe all of this doom and gloom today has got me thinking about the idea of failure after doing the One Year Bible readings but there is more to it than that.

Anniversaries get you thinking and this month I will have been working here in Tullamore and Mountmellick for five years. At that time I became the minister of the second smallest group of churches in the whole of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland. In my first two years the lowest turnout in Mountmellick was two while in Tullamore it was zero. Right at the start of being here I think I had a quite romantic vision of where we would be in five years time. After a mix of faithful preaching and a pretty serious level of outreach and evangelism we are now no longer the second smallest group of churches in the Presbyterian Church in Ireland – we are the smallest.

This isn’t to say that there haven’t been successes over the last five years. In Tullamore alone over one hundred people have taken part in one of our Alpha or Youth Alpha Courses, a great many of whom have come to faith or had their faith renewed. There are people in both towns whose lives have changed significantly for the better as a direct result of the ministry here but frustratingly and stubbornly in both towns the church numbers refuse to rise and indeed in both towns have actually declined.

Is this failure or am I just looking at things from the wrong perspective?

I derive a great deal of hope from the story of a man called Epaphroditus in Philippians chapter two. He was a man sent to help Saint Paul in his imprisonment by looking after him. Back in those days prison was a very different place from what it is now. Then as now prison was about the removal of someone’s liberty and dignity, their freedom and self-esteem but back in those days in a Roman prison prisoners were deliberately fed less than the amount that it would take to keep someone alive. There was a duty placed upon the prisoner’s own friends or family to look after the basic needs of the prisoner.

This is where Epaphroditus comes in. He was sent by the people of Philippi to look after Paul while he was held in prison awaiting trial and a possible death sentence. It was a really good plan but it went badly wrong when Epaphroditus himself took ill. Rather than being the man who would be there to ease Paul’s burdens in prison it seems that through his illness he actually became a burden himself to Paul.

Philippi was a military colony, re-founded by retired soldiers about eighty years before Paul wrote this letter and something of its military character is still present by the time of the New Testament. Indeed Epaphroditus is deliberately referred to here by Paul as a “Fellow soldier... who risked his life for the work of Christ.” This military background might be part of the reason why Epaphroditus was distressed to find out that the church that sent him had heard that he was ill. The military, be it Roman or otherwise, don’t take failure all that well. The veterans in Philippi probably weren’t too pleased to discover that the man they sent to look after Paul needed looking after himself.

This makes Paul’s words about him all the more poignant and beautiful. He could so easily have said, “What did you think you were doing sending this idiot to be a burden to me?” Instead he says, “He is a true brother, co-worker, and fellow soldier. And he was your messenger to help me in my need... Welcome him with Christian love and with great joy, and give him the honour that people like him deserve. For he risked his life for the work of Christ, and he was at the point of death while doing for me what you couldn’t do from far away.” In these words Paul honours a man who had a go and failed. He esteems someone who could have stayed comfortably in Philippi and sent money or good wishes but instead choose to go himself far from his homeland and into the insanitary conditions of a Roman jail to try to look after Paul.

Did he fail? Yes.

Did he try? Yes.

Was it worth it? Paul says yes.

Could this work to rebuild the Presbyterian Churches in Laois and Offaly fail? Yes.

Did we try and did we put our best into it? Yes.

Will it all be worth it? I hope one day God will say yes!

I think I’ll leave the last words in this to Theodore Roosevelt who said -

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”