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Addiction or Balance?
Keeping your chapter on track

Pat Conley,
InterVarsity staff worker in Alaska

 
I’ve been an addict of many things throughout my 28 years of life. Some have been intense addictions, others mild. Most have been embarrassing and harmful to my relationship with God and with others. But one of my most recent addictions hasn’t been quite as harmful (I don’t think) as some of the ones I’ve struggled with in the past. In fact, I’ve actually learned a thing or two from it.

You see, some time ago, I went to Best Buy^® and bought a copy of Sid Meier’s Civilization II™, a computer game. I had a roommate at the time, and he and I soon found ourselves playing hour after hour of this entrancing game. The game itself is like an intricate form of Risk. You begin in the year 4000 BC and start constructing a civilization by building villages. These villages grow into towns and eventually cities. All the while, you have scientists researching new technologies that, when discovered, give you new city improvements or military units you can build. But you have to set the tax rate, which determines, in part, how much you spend on research and how much wealth you accumulate, which can be used in other facets of the game. You must also interact with other civilizations on the planet, which necessitates more decision-making: will you attempt to sign a treaty with other civilizations? Or will you ask for money or a technology or a military unit from them? Is it time to establish an embassy? Or is it time to go to war? In addition, you must also try to build wonders of the world, which involves intensive labor that is taken away from developing cities and your military. And yet building a wonder will benefit you greatly in the end.

I guess one of the things I’m learning from this detailed game is balance. Sometimes you must sacrifice amassing an army in order to build a wonder of the world. Sometimes you must sacrifice productivity or income to recruit entertainers or build city improvements to make your people happy (or else they’ll turn on you). But in the end, the best way to win a game of “Civ” is to have a balanced civilization: one with a hearty army to ward off attacks from other civilizations, one with a goodly amount of technologies discovered, a good bank account, happy citizens, and “wonders.” While it may become necessary to put emphasis on one area or another as your civilization develops, in the end, none can be neglected for your civilization to survive.

I’ve found the same thing to be true with our InterVarsity chapter, indeed with the body of Christ as a whole: there are many areas that we can emphasize, but we must keep striving for balance.

What are some of those areas? I’m glad you asked. Taped on the window frame in my office is a piece of paper that I all too often neglect. It’s titled simply, “Marks of Strong Chapters.” Summarizing a longer article*, it reads:

1. Strong student leaders/leadership teams to serve and lead: vision, calling to commitment, leadership selection, continuous process—every class (year) of students.

2. Partnership of staff and students: trust, close partnership, openness.

3. Community: high quality in relationships, good large-group meetings—worship, music, teaching.

4. Evangelism: corporate and individual.

5. Small groups: training of leaders, implementing a clear sense of vision, development of new and future small-group leaders, accountability—protect leaders and small groups from detaching.

6. Training: establishing life patterns in various areas.

7. New student outreach: a relational welcome, structural integration into chapter life.

8. Prayer: dependence on God.

9. Traditions: those which (a) lead to progress, (b) make constructive contributions.

These are the areas that I believe we need to strive for balance in, which means we ask the questions of “What is going well?” “What areas are suffering?” and “What needs emphasis, and how do we do that?” There are certainly times when I think we need to emphasize one or two areas in order to come out in the end with a balanced chapter (see Rick Richardson’s comments about this in the lead article, “Out of the Box.”) As with Civilization, if we allow the “scientific research” in our training area to become the be-all and end-all, we will end up with nothing in the “bank account” of our small groups. And if we never “build the wonder” of new student outreach, we’ll end up with a weak or non-existent “military” of student leadership and community.

In other words, these areas might not all develop at the same rate or at the same time, but we can’t afford to let any single area receive nothing but neglect—or (related, but worse yet) the complacent, “It’ll take care of itself.” It won’t.

The interesting thing about Civilization is that your civilization is constantly growing. That is, when you concentrate on an area (say, scientific research) and become strong in it, the other areas must then be brought up to the strength level of your emphasis. You can’t concentrate on scientific research, reach a level, then neglect it all together. It still demands some attention, even when concentrating on other areas. It’s less like a balance or scales, and more like a high-jump bar. It’s as if you’re constantly raising the bar, sometimes from one end, sometimes from the other—but it’s always going up, up, up.

So ask, “What areas are ‘ahead’ in our chapter? What makes them so?” “What must be done in concentrating on the other areas to bring them up to speed—or even set a new standard?” How do we make sure everything gets its due attention? I’m convinced that the answers to these questions come from careful analysis, then reckless brainstorming and wily risk-taking. What new thing is God doing in each of these areas?

Civilization, of course, is not without its goals. As your civilization advances, it hopefully emerges as the civilization on the planet to be most emulated. Similarly, our goal in building a strong, balanced chapter is to work with God in achieving his goal, which is succinctly laid out for us in Ephesians 1:9—10, “And [God] made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times will have reached their fulfillment—to bring all things in heaven and on earth together under one head, even Christ.”

—Pat Conley has been on staff for four years. He and his wife Kendra serve students at the U. of Minnesota–Twin Cities campus.

*See a fuller development of these points in “The Marks of Strong I-V Chapters” and “Hitting the Mark?” by Doug Whallon, in SLJ, Summer 1993, p. 20. You can find it on the Web by browsing the SLJ index under the topic “Leadership.”