Just recently I had my first lesson in snowboarding¹ and it was an experience I can tell you.

Despite living in Sweden for over a decade for a variety of reasons I’ve never quite managed to get going with winter sports. As my children have got older I didn’t want them to miss out on this opportunity. So that I can enjoy it with them I determined to get some basic competence on the snow slopes.

I’ve only ever skied three times in my life and each time was a humbling mixture of failure, fear and fun. Mostly the first two. So in taking up the challenge to learn to snowboard I wasn’t approaching the task with balance, experience or competence from another sport.

I spent most of my day getting up off my butt or up off my face. I felt like I did a hundred press ups and sit ups just to get myself upright. Very little actual snowboarding happened and an awful lot of wobbling, flailing of arms, falling over & crashing did.

I watched small kids, teenagers, adults and senior citizens whizz past me with grace & ease, swooshing, gliding, jumping & just making the whole enterprise look so easy. How could it be that they were so gifted and I was so incompetent?

The day ended with me tired, exhausted, frustrated & with little progress to speak of. It would have been very easy to just give in right there and declare the whole enterprise of snowboarding, ‘not for me’. What encouraged me was the reminder from my friends that everyone at the beginning spends as much time on their butt as on their board. Making the comparison to people days, months, years ahead of me was both unfair & unhelpful.

Whenever we talk about church planting with church planters we can all easily fall into the comparison trap. Someone else has made it look easy whereas here I am spending most of time just picking myself up. Again.

Planting a church can be is a challenge and has been (so far) a decade long investment. I’ve written before that an essential to church planting is perseverance & I’m certain we wouldn’t be where we are today if both myself and our team didn’t have perseverance in spades.

One of the most essential qualities in building a church community that can endure is the ability to just get up & keep going. Make the mistakes and then make the adjustments. In the nearly eleven years of Grace Church’s existence we have kept the same vision but adjusted our methods, our venues, our expectations, our styles and pretty much everything that is not our doctrine.

We came to Sweden with the desire to make disciples and plant churches in the Swedish language. It took us nine years to get there and now we are there it isn’t me that’s primarily doing any of that. That’s not exactly what I expected. But we wouldn’t have got there at all if we hadn’t persevered through all the painful lessons.

If we had looked at the ones doing it better and instead of gaining inspiration took discouragement then what we see today we wouldn’t be seeing at all.

A couple of days later, I went back to the scene of my repeated downfalls and with my boots firmly secured to my board, I calmly stood up and (mostly under control) glided down the slope. Now I’m ready for the next lesson and bigger challenges. Don’t give up.

1. It did not look like the picture [↩]