“When we emphasize the importance of making and keeping promises, we need also to help people learn to assess the kinds of commitments they should make. One pastor realized that he could help volunteers in the church anticipate whether they would be able to keep the promises they made. He learned to ask them, ‘Well, what kind of week is ahead for you? What can you expect?’ Gradually he guided them into being able to discern when it was right to say no to certain opportunities. In another congregation, the pastor had learned not to make commitments if she was unsure the congregation would be willing to keep them, even when they involved fairly simple things. She found it helpful instead to engage in a steady effort to bring people onboard before taking on any new project.
“In our efforts to strengthen the practice of promising, it is important to be careful about the commitments we ask for from others. As noted earlier, commitments should be rightly ordered within our covenantal relationship with God. Many people have a nagging sense that they should be doing more — but they are working with a very unwieldy notion of what they should be doing. A renewed emphasis on our most important promises could be profoundly freeing for them.
“Because it is often taken for granted, promise-keeping is usually overlooked when it is functioning well. Recognizing acts of fidelity, and occasionally naming ordinary ones as important, can strengthen the practice. We can reflect on stewardship as an expression of being faithful with resources and as an act of fidelity to God, community, and past and future generations. Similarly, when we reflect together on church membership as entailing significant promises, even life-altering commitments, we challenge consumer attitudes toward congregational life.
“Keeping promises can be very costly. In contemporary culture, however, self-sacrifice – which is often about faithfulness in the hard places — is sometimes seen as dysfunctional. We need to become more careful about how sacrifice is interpreted. Caring for a child with severe disabilities, for example, or an aging parent who needs more and more attention, can affect the caregiver’s health, relationships, career, and capacity to do other things. When caregivers become weary, congregations should have more supportive responses than telling them that they ‘need better boundaries’ or should take a day off. Faithful support of the caregivers makes their long-term sacrifices more bearable. Their care is an expression of fidelity that is deserving of respect and honor from the community.
“Surely discernment is needed when our fidelity and our limitations crash into each other. There are times when our commitments overwhelm us, and we need wisdom and help. Years ago, Edith Schaeffer, co-founder of L’Abri Fellowship, observed that ‘it is not sinful to be finite.’ Patterns of rest and renewal within community are crucial to sustaining fidelity over the long term.”
— from Christine D. Pohl, Living into Community: Cultivating Practices That Sustain Us (Eerdmans, 2012)