Get out of the Huddle

A while back I attended a course which is held annually called “The Leadership Summit” with a few other staff members. There were quite a few speakers who shared a number of valuable points, and many things stood out to me. Of all the inspirational and motivating speakers, one in particular caught my attention – he was hard to miss!

Harvey Carey is the Senior Pastor of Citadel of Faith Covenant Church in Detroit, Michigan. He is a very animated and dynamic speaker, and his congregation is “committed to providing real solutions for people and communities in distress.”

Harvey communicated many things about the love of God and the transforming truths of His word. Of all the inspirational statements he made though, one thing stood out to me the most and has been stuck in my mind. He said, “you have to get out of the huddle!”

His illustration went something like this…

Imagine you have tickets to a football game, you’ve paid a big price for them, you’re sitting in a front row seat, and then the players just stay in their huddle talking about what they are going to do but never do it. You wouldn’t be very satisfied with your game experience. If this happened, you’d probably get upset and perhaps ask for your money back. The point of a football game is not to stand there and talk about what you’re going to do, but to go out and do it – the point is to play the game.

Harvey went on to explain that he feels this is what’s happening with our churches today. We’re getting together to huddle but we’re not actually going out and playing the game. We talk about God’s love for humanity but we don’t go out and share it with the world around us. We gather together and talk about all the great things He has done for us, but keep Him to ourselves in our church buildings. We huddle on Sunday morning, Sunday evening, and we even have a mid week huddle. Meanwhile God’s sitting on the sidelines in His front row seat saying, “hey, I paid a big price for you, and all you’re going to do is stand there together in a huddle?!”

Maybe we can relate this to the organizations and agencies that work with poverty and homelessness in our city too. Obviously the planning part is important and needs to be done, but maybe we spend too much time planning what we’ll do to combat the effects of poverty and not enough time actually doing it. Maybe this is also what our government does.

I have two huddles to get out of; the church services huddle and the non-profit charity planning huddle.

Where do you huddle? What huddles do you need to get out of?

Sarah Enns
Community Education Coordinator