One Sunday, the slides didn't work. Or, more accurately, there was no one to run the slides.
I watched from the back as the congregation fumbled for their phones, squinting at tiny screens to find the second verse to "How Great Thou Art." A few people just sang from memory, their voices carrying the melody while others hummed along uncertainly.
And it was what we needed.
A theology of imperfection
"Let there be gaps" has become one of my core ministry philosophies, a deliberate choice to put people over performance. It can sound heretical in a church culture obsessed with ✨excellence✨, where we've bought into the lie that God's love somehow depends on our ability to deliver a flawless Sunday morning experience.
But ministry is too holy to treat volunteers like cannon fodder. As my old boss Pastor John Messer used to say, "We don't throw people into the breach." And yet that's what happens when we prioritize institutional perfection over human dignity. We create a system where the same faithful few run slides every single week, make coffee every single Sunday, staff the nursery until they're running on nothing but fumes and resentment.
We might tell ourselves it's for the good of the congregation, that gaps would hurt people's experience. But we're practicing a consumerist theology, where the church exists to be a purveyor of spiritual goods and services.
False abundance
When the same two people handle the slides every week without fail, the congregation assumes everything is fine. They hear announcements about needing volunteers, but their eyes tell them a different story. The slides are up. The coffee is hot. The nursery is staffed. Clearly, they don't really need help.
Let people show up to no slides, an empty coffee station, and no childcare because your volunteers are getting the sabbath they deserve. Then they see the labor they never noticed.
Sometimes you have to let the status quo reveal its own unsustainability.
I'm not manufacturing a crisis or withholding care to manipulate anyone. A handful of people can't carry the whole burden of communal worship, and we shouldn't ask them to. When gaps appear, new hands can join the work.
The consumer church
The pushback I get on this tells me how far we've internalized a consumer model of faith. We've divided our communities into producers and consumers, where a dedicated few (usually 20% of the congregation) work without rest to provide a five-star spiritual experience for everyone else. It's Burger King theology. Have it your way.
But the early church looked nothing like this. Paul takes participation for granted in 1 Corinthians 14:26: "When you come together, each one has a hymn, a lesson, a revelation, a tongue, or an interpretation." In those house churches, everyone brought something to the common table, and the community's wellbeing belonged to all of them.
This is koinonia—the kind of fellowship where we are all producers and consumers at once.
What people come for
Letting gaps show can be an (albeit risky) act of prophetic imagination. It disrupts the fantasy that churches run on pastoral magic and volunteer martyrdom.
Maybe folks aren't coming for your artisanal coffee or your perfectly timed slide transitions. Maybe they're coming for a place to wrestle with the holy mysteries. Strip away the non-essentials—what my Old Testament professor called the "butt-naked essentialism"—and you find out what your community cares about.
I've seen churches panic about nursery coverage, only to discover that families are (occasionally!) happy to worship together, children included. I've watched congregations survive electricity failures and find that singing together, without the crutch of perfect technology, brought them closer than any polished presentation.
Sabbath for volunteers
Underneath all of this, I'm trying to give sabbath to the people who serve. Your most dedicated volunteers deserve to sit in the pew and be ministered to for once.
If I as the pastor refuse to let the gaps show, I'm saying that the comfort of the many matters more than the wellbeing of the few who serve. I'm perpetuating a system where faithfulness is rewarded with endless obligation. Ew.
I trust that God's work doesn't depend on my ability to maintain perfect systems. And I believe the Spirit moves in the spaces between our carefully planned programs as much as in them, maybe more.
Back to that Sunday
With no one behind the iMac keyboard, people looked up from their phones and made eye contact. They listened more carefully to the words they were singing. They helped each other find the page numbers in hymnals we hadn't used in months.
And by Tuesday, three people had volunteered to join the tech team. It was a tinsy-tiny resurrection.
