Tractor Pulls and Trains

I’m getting ready to sit down with a brother pastor to talk about what else our two churches could do together.

We already share a youth program. Nobody forced it. Nobody wrote a grant for it. We looked around, figured the kids needed one, and realized neither of us was going to build a good one alone. So we quit trying to. Now we’re asking the obvious next question: what else?

I’m convinced that’s the question the church needs to be asking a whole lot more of.

If you’ve never been to a tractor pull, here’s how it works. A tractor, or truck, hooks to a sled. As the sled moves down the track, the weight box slides forward, and the farther you go, the harder it gets. That’s by design. The whole event is built to find out exactly where one machine quits. Engine screaming, front end coming off the ground, and then the thing just stops. Whoever stalls last wins.

That’s how most of us do ministry. One pastor. One staff. One building. One budget. And every year somebody slides the weight a little farther forward: more families with more needs, fewer volunteers, higher bills, a calendar that never lightens up. We keep our foot down and call it faithfulness. Sometimes it is. A lot of the time though, it’s pride with a nice name on it.

But something here should bother us. We’ve built a whole culture around the tractor pull. The church with the best program, the biggest crowd, or the nicest building is “winning.” The church down the road is somewhere between a competitor and a nuisance. We’d never say that out loud. But just watch how we act.

Now think about a railroad. When the train gets heavier, nobody asks the engine to try harder. They add engines. A few on the front, one in the middle, one pushing from the back if they have to. Nobody in the rail yard treats adding a locomotive like an admission of failure. Railroads will couple up power that doesn’t even wear the same paint, because the train doesn’t care whose logo is on the side. It cares whether the load moves. And if it makes it to the destination.

A tractor pull is a contest to find out where one engine breaks. A train is a decision that nothing has to.

So the question that I wrestle with more often than not. If you and I confess the same Jesus, in the same words, off the same page, what exactly are we protecting?

I’m not talking about pretending our differences don’t matter. Where we don’t confess the same thing, we ought to be honest about that. I’m talking about the ones who do. The ones standing on the same ground, saying the same creed, pointing at the same Savior, and still running parallel ministries in separate buildings like we’re fighting for market share. Jesus prayed that his people would be one. Not one-ish. Not one on Easter. We’ve gotten pretty good at answering that prayer with a separate parking lot.

Picture what it could look like. One church has a gift for kids and nobody to lead teenagers. The church across the road has a youth leader who can hold a room of seventh graders and no one to run a nursery. Each is quietly limping at the thing the other does well. Apart, both strain. Coupled, the load gets lighter for both. That’s not a merger and it’s not a compromise. It’s two engines on the same train. You carry what I can’t. I carry what you can’t. Nobody gets smaller, and the people we’re trying to reach get more church than either of us could ever give them alone.

I don’t know yet what comes out of this morning’s conversation. Maybe it’s shared events, maybe training for volunteers, maybe a service project, maybe something smaller than any of that. Maybe something bigger. But I know which direction I want to lean. I’m tired of watching faithful pastors wear themselves out pulling the sled alone, and I’m tired of calling it a virtue.

The load isn’t getting lighter. Go find another engine.