This week I read the story of an absurd year-long battle over whether Pepsi or Coca-cola would have the first soda in space. In what sounds more like a Veep plotline than coherent corporate strategy, the two companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars designing specialized containers, lobbying senators, and campaigning to be sent first. Everyone from NASA to the White House to the House of Representatives were roped in, and asked to pick sides in this full-court press to get one of these two sodas on a space shuttle. 

You can imagine how this started, maybe someone in the Coca-cola conference room suggesting that it might be cool to have an astronaut drinking one of their products in the space station. Maybe they float the idea to NASA, and NASA mentions that Pepsi has asked, too. They report back to their boss, who reports to their boss, who reports to their boss, and then, well, we’re off to the races. 

All of the sudden the goal shifts from “cool marketing opportunity” to “beat our long-standing nemesis.” Any sense of scope and scale, of how much either company is willing to invest in this idea is blown right into orbit. Making sure the other company wasn’t the first to have soda in space became far more important than the original idea of having their product in space ever was.

This sounded familiar to me. Working in large churches, I will confess that I spent more than a little time scrolling through the Instagram of other big churches in town, looking at the things my friends and peers created, checking the big group photo for a headcount of how many people were at their back to school event. There were plenty of hours logged in worship planning meetings chasing the idea of creating a digital soundscape, or branded giveaways, or a children’s bulletin, because someone heard of it at such and such place. Once something was introduced as a thing someone else did, we became so caught up in how to do it, it was like it never occurred to us that we didn’t have to. 

But do you know what the astronauts learned when they finally took that half-million dollar sip of soda in space? You can’t really drink soda in zero gravity, or at least you can’t enjoy it. Carbonation and digestion work weirdly in that environment, and it causes extremely uncomfortable “wet burps” where gas and liquid are burped out together. Now there’s neither Coke nor Pepsi in space, because, despite how hard they worked to pull it off, how impressive it was, it didn’t actually work for the people who were supposed to use it. 

I worked at a church that had a VBS of over 700 kids. We were so proud of that number. We got so many impressive photos of hordes of children in our sanctuary, told so many stories of the army of volunteers it took to pull off. We had to shut down almost every other program for the week it ran, everyone was pulled off of their normal jobs to help, and we had to pull in the police department to manage parking, but gosh darn it, we did it.

Do you know what I think of now that I am a mom? 

My kids would have hated being in a room with 700 kids. One is rather shy, and one is outgoing, but doesn’t do well when she can’t move around freely. We as adults were so impressed with it, we were so proud of being able to pull something like that off. But was it impressive to the kids, or was this something we did just to say we did it? 

Since then, that church has intentionally scaled back the size of the VBS, capping it at a few hundred registrations. Still massive, but a size where the leadership can more manageably ensure a better experience for kids. We now attend a church where they go into a nursery with 3 or 4 kids, total, and they play with toys and listen to a story and have a snack, and that’s the best possible situation for my kids.

This week, consider the trap competition and comparison can draw us into, chasing after a picture of success that doesn’t actually serve those we’re called to. Where do we get lost in the weeds, competing with one another instead of creating things our communities need? Where do we lose the thread of what really matters to our community? What is the cause of our temptation, and how can we right size it? 

I’m interested to hear what bubbles up.