The Painful Cost of Lowering the Bar

A tough day at practice

As a teenager, I was a decent hockey player on a middling team. Every season we lost to a better team, a team that also played travel tournaments. Wanting to push myself a bit, I asked to join them for some tournaments, and surprisingly, they said yes.

On my first day of practice, I was excited to get to skate with better players… until we got started. The coach skated us until my legs nearly fell off. I was used to 10-15 minutes of conditioning drills to open an hour’s practice. My new team did 40 minutes. The long-timers handled it well, but a couple of us new guys simply could not hang.

I told the coach I felt like I was about to vomit—partly because I did feel like that, partly because I thought that would get me a couple of minutes of rest. I thought wrong.

He said, “That’s fine, you wouldn’t be the first. There’s a trash can here on the bench if you need to, then you can get back out there.” They weren’t going to lower their standards for anybody. If you were going to be on the team, you were going to skate with the team.

All of that was new to me. I had never been pushed that hard, and I had never been told to keep digging deeper rather than be let off the hook.

To be honest, I was embarrassed at how out of shape I was. But I kept going back. They were a winning team, and I wanted to be on a winning team, even if it meant getting run into the ground at every practice. Why?

Because, I quickly realized that they won precisely because they practiced hard and did not lower the bar for people who didn’t want to keep up.

In other words, the thing that drew players to them was also the most likely thing to push players away. Over time, only the dedicated were going to stick it out. That meant a lot of guys quit. It also meant they always had a team full of players who were fully committed. The high expectations at practice made the team better, but it also served as a filtering mechanism.

There's an invaluable life lesson in that:

Lowering the bar to coddle the individual hurts the group and the individual.

If they had taken pity on me and canceled the grueling drills, I wouldn’t have gotten better, so it would have been worse for me. At the same time, the rest of the team would have been deprived of the greater challenge, making each of them worse. And, if we’ve made everybody a little worse, then we’ve made the whole team worse.

This is why modern, feelings-focused Christianity has been such a disaster.

We have harmed the individual by lowering the bar to protect their feelings. This, in turn, keeps others from striving for more. As a result, our churches are deprived of spiritual maturity across the board.

If we talk about, for example, modesty, it might get controversial. Someone might have a problem with it and leave. So maybe we just don’t talk about it.

But that means the person who wants to be immodest never gets called to greater holiness. The person who doesn’t necessarily want to be immodest, but doesn’t know any better, suffers from our catering to the first person. Now the whole church is weaker because we have withheld Biblical principles from them. Lowering the bar for the one person lowers it for everyone, holding back the entire church.

What kind of bar do you think Jesus set when He required His followers to deny self and take up a cross (Luke 9:23)?

To be honest, His exchanges with the would-be followers at the end of Luke 9, and with the Rich Young Ruler in Luke 18, sounded a lot like what I heard from my old coach.

The Savior pushed those men into deciding: are you going to cling to your comfort and quit now, or are you going to go all-in and commit to being a disciple? Most of the time, Jesus’ demands drove people away. That never made Him change His tactics.

What kind of bar is the modern church setting when it refuses to push members to grow? What kind of bar do we set when we won’t talk about uncomfortable issues because somebody might get upset, or leave? What kind of bar is set when attendance and participation are left up to personal preference? What kind of bar do we set when everything is catered to making the unconverted feel comfortable in the worship service?

Come in weak, walk out strong

We can focus on the lowest common denominator and lower the bar for everybody.
Or we can invite everybody, but keep the bar high enough that only the committed will stick around.

If we’re not careful, church can become a “come as you are, stay as you are” system, leaving the masses unchanged. The answer is not to become a “don’t come until you’re good enough” system, but rather a “come as you are, and we’ll help you rise to the challenge” kind of system.

To go back to my painful day at practice, notice, they didn’t kick me off the team for lagging behind. Nobody made fun of me. In fact, a number of them encouraged me and told me how they felt the exact same way at their first practice. It was a huge boost to know that if I stuck around, I could get to their level, too.

When we do the “we’re all broken sinners” thing in church to make everyone feel comfortable, we cheapen God’s calling. The visitor and the new Christian should feel like I did after that practice: grasping the difficulty of the challenge, but also aware that growth is achievable with God’s help and with our brothers’ and sisters’ encouragement.

Expectations make all the difference—and I don’t mean expectations that we can pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. Rather, I mean the expectation that if exposed to God’s Word and accountability to help live by it, people will start to look more like Christ.

As always, that has to be the ultimate goal. For the individual, for their brothers and sisters, and for the whole.

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Notes

• This week’s Think Deeper Podcast episode is one I’m extra proud of. It’s highly specific and practical about the problems men and women face while trying to be the husbands and wives God calls them to be. Watch it here or search Think Deeper on your podcast app.

• I’ve been asked about the Plan of Salvation shirt recently and haven’t linked it in a while, so here’s a reminder you can pick one up here!