I was listening to an interview1 with a woman who had just written a book on mental illness in animals, and she said this:
“When we try to get a bird to solve a puzzle, we tell ourselves we’re testing to see how smart the bird is, but all we’re really testing is how much the bird wants to solve our [bleep] puzzle.”
She went on to elaborate that some birds just like puzzles more than others. Some birds care more about treats than others. She said that while we tend to think of animals as either good or bad, smart or dumb, by species, the reality is that individual animals are as varied as individual humans are. Some dolphins are kind and friendly, and some are real jerks. Some elephants like to pull pranks, and some hate them; and while some monkeys have a really hard time at the zoo, some monkeys seem to prefer having their meals brought to them than gathering them themselves.
She said that one of the most critical missteps we had taken in the study of animals was assuming that all animals were the same, and that they all responded in predictable, rational ways to their environment. What’s odd is that it’s a misstep that we could have avoided if we had just taken a moment to consider our own matrix of motivations and choices.
If you stopped me and offered me a treat if I finished a puzzle, the difficulty of the puzzle would be only one of very many factors in whether I completed it. Am I hungry? Am I busy? How good is this treat? Is it the kind of puzzle I enjoy?
Because a crossword, on a Sunday afternoon, for a warm brownie? You bet. An accounting puzzle in the middle of a busy Monday for some nabisco wafers? I’ll pass. The results of this scenario as a study would be that Kat Bairs only completed 50% of puzzles, but does that mean that she was only half as smart as someone who completed 100%? Not necessarily, the reality is actually a lot more complex.
So when do we treat our communities like birds we asked to solve a puzzle? Where are we oversimplifying motivation, or making generalizations where nuance is called for?
When our numbers decline or grow, we are quick to attribute it to our own action, to discrete choices that we can control. Congregants don’t like this pastor, or are excited about our new sermon series. Or, on the other hand, we make gross generalizations based on our data; we say young people just don’t care about God anymore, or people never came back to church after Covid.
And all of those things might be true, but the picture is actually a lot more complicated and varied. I worked at a church once that, on their weekly attendance spreadsheet by service, had a column where you jotted down what the weather was like. When I was a youth pastor, we had to adjust our attendance expectations for the Sunday that was after Prom. And that’s only the very surface – people choose to, or not to, go to church based on the quality of programming, but also the quality of their connections, the emotional and spiritual needs of their week, their health, whether they can afford the gas, their response to larger cultural events (does tragedy make them isolate and hide from hard conversations, or drive them to connect with others), and ten thousand other factors.
My husband and I went to a church for a while that we loved. The community was great, the preaching and music were wonderful, we found ourselves both cared for and challenged. When our twins were born, though, we stopped going.
Because they didn’t have a nursery, and the music, which I loved and felt connected to God with, was really too loud for infants. Could we have made it work? Could we have found a sitter on Sunday mornings, or made our kids wear headphones? Sure, but it doesn’t matter how good the preaching is if you can’t hear it because you’re in the lobby with a fussy baby.
We changed churches. We love our new church too, but the fact is that, even as committed Christians who go to church every week, who volunteer, give, and are pretty all-in on this Jesus business, my decision about where I went to church had nothing to do with theology, preaching, or programs. We picked a church in our theological tradition that we could walk to that had a nursery.
The decision-making framework is just as multi-faceted for every single person who walks through your doors (or doesn’t). This is both good and bad news for us as a Christian leaders. The good news is that you can be fully assured that changes in your congregation, or a loss of the Good Ole Days, are not your fault. It probably has a lot more to do with systemic cultural shifts. The bad news is that you can do everything right and it might not change a whole lot.
But here’s the other good news: you can do everything wrong, and culture can be working against you, and there can be a rainstorm, and a home game, the morning after Prom… And God will still be at work. God is still working. And as long as we faithfully pursue our call and build our communities, we can rest assured that God, who knows every inch of the complex web that we use to make decisions, is at work putting people where they can encounter the presence of God.
Sometimes the bird doesn’t want to do the puzzle, even with the best treats in the world. And sometimes, even when everything is working against them, and there’s no treats in it at all, birds will compose music. We are complex, and bafflingly variable creatures. Thank God.
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