Survivorship Bias
/Came across a pretty interesting YouTube video that gets at one of the major problems with how we as the church reflect on the church and what makes a "successful" ministry. The idea of the video is that survivorship bias, the thing that happens when you only ask the "survivors" or those that ended up on top so to speak, naturally skews our interpretation of what went well in any particular context.
This is so true of how we generally reflect on the church and ministry. Who speaks at every conference? Who gets published? Whose blogs get the most traffic? While it's certainly helpful to learn from those who ended up with the largest churches or the most impactful non-profits, when we only listen to these voices we ended up getting a skewed picture of what faithful discipleship and Kingdom leadership looks like. What's more, it reinforces certain categories or markers of "success" over others, which leads to more resources being dedicated to a narrow band of practices.
After nearly 20 years of serving in various ministry leadership roles, I'm pretty convinced that the work of Christ's Kingdom happens most in the small, the mundane, and the day to day. But it's pretty hard to keep that in mind when what gets lifted up is the big, the loud, and the once-in-a-lifetime big event.
Check it out and let me know what you think: