In 1977, NASA launched twin space probes, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, on a relatively low-profile five-year mission to fly past Jupiter and Saturn and take pictures. They excelled in their respective jobs, and led to incredible discoveries that shaped our understanding of the gas giants in our solar system, and the formation of planets writ large. 

And then, they kept going. 

They kept flying, kept sending pictures, kept sending radio transmissions, including, famously, of the Pale Blue Dot, taken 36 years ago. The Voyager kept plugging away, so NASA kept supporting it, building networks of giant satellites specifically to hear the signals coming in from deep space, because as long as Voyager was still speaking, we were going to listen. 

Forty-nine years into its 5 year mission, Voyager 1 has traveled farther than any spacecraft in human history, and is the first manmade object in interstellar space. The Voyager has, over the past half-century, shifted from a minor space probe to one of the most inspiring and beloved missions in all of NASA’s history (and future).¹

It has me thinking of what we do and do not expect much out of. We all have had programs that we invested so much time, effort, resources, and care into, only to struggle to get them over the finish line (if they get there at all). We have all had work that we have been sure was going to be successful, that we have pulled out all the stops for, only for it to underwhelm us. And, we have all had Voyagers. 

Small, low-budget, low-expectation projects from the margins that wind up taking our breath away. They go farther, learn more, and capture people’s imaginations in ways that baffle us as much as they delight us.

I’m working with children and youth teams for a regional adjudicatory, including their youth leadership team – a group of middle and high school kids who support the youth operations of the state. We did a visioning event with the teams in January, and one of the teenaged leaders proposed “Big Youth Group” – a monthly event where teenagers in small youth groups of just a few kids could gather, with rotating church hosts, and have a, well, big youth group. It would be teen led and organized, and exist to deepen and widen the friendships forged at conference camps and retreats. I looked at this high school junior in January of this year as he pitched his idea (developed through a design thinking workshop we had done over the morning) and I said, “When do you want to start?” and he replied “April 11, at my church.” 

And, what do you know, it did. That teenager and his friends organically ideated, organized, and facilitated a collaborative parish youth-led youth ministry model, all with a budget of about $2,000 and a few volunteer hours from adults. It met every month, until the adult volunteers asked for it to drop to bi-monthly because they couldn’t get communications out fast enough. The kids obliged, and the party has continued, with the most recent one happening just a few weeks ago. 

It was fascinating to watch, from largely the outside, how an institution responds to a situation like this; a low budget, marginal project that takes on a life of its own. There is often an impulse to pump the brakes on anything we don’t understand, to ask a lot of questions, to go looking for a reason that it isn’t as successful as it looks like it is. Especially when a project is led by those outside of traditional authority, there is a suspicion, an often subtle desire to discredit their success, because of insecurity, a lack of trust, mixed often with real (if marginal) concerns about process and procedure. 

But I think about the Voyager. When it blew past what everyone expected of it, NASA could have very easily allowed its unexpected success to float off into oblivion – it had other, higher profile projects to focus on. But NASA built entire systems of infrastructure behind the Voyager to support it. It never tried to slow it down, or asked the system to take on extra tasks, but built the satellite systems and radars it would need to make sure that no matter how far it flew, and no matter what it sent back, NASA would be able to hear it. 

When we get Voyagers, could we learn to do the same? Could we, as church leaders, learn to respond to those unexpected successes that emerge in our congregations, in our communities, on our margins, not by diminishing them, or hijacking them into our larger goals, but by building the infrastructure behind and beneath them so that we can learn what they have to tell us? 

I hope so, there are Voyagers among us, and I can’t wait to see how far they’ll take us. 

1. Here is NASA’s dedicated page to the Voyager, it is excellent and fun to use, and made me feel like a kid again. Enjoy. ↩︎