When I was twelve years old, my family moved from here in the Lehigh Valley to Atlanta, Georgia. My father had been a senior executive at an outdoor advertising company, and when the company was finally sold, he and several of the other executives banded together to buy Turner Outdoor, the billboard company in Atlanta owned by media mogul Ted Turner where Turner got his first start in business.
Turner’s focus had moved to radio and television, and he was particularly 
excited about his recently founded Cable News Network, or CNN, which was based on his then-crazy idea that there was an audience for a 24-hour a day news network. Looking to free up some capital and focus on TV, Turner put the billboard company up for sale and my father and his colleagues bought it. So, you could say that I’m indirectly responsible for the rise of 24 hours-a-day cable news, which has brought so much goodness and light into the world ever since. You’re welcome.
Anyway, one of the fringe benefits of the sale was access to seats immediately behind the owner’s box for the Atlanta Braves, which Turner also owned. Now, given the current standings in the National League East, I just want to take a moment to assure all the Phillies fans here that I no longer identify as an Atlanta fan, and I have taken the oath as a citizen of Phillies Nation for the duration of this postseason. But it was still pretty great to have those seats. As a 12-year-old, though, I was less enamored by the other benefit, which was access to the Stadium Club, where you dined not on peanuts and Cracker Jacks, but on prime rib sliced right at your table in air-conditioned comfort while watching the game through big glass windows. That part wasn’t so bad; the real problem was that men had to wear a coat and tie in the club, and therefore to the entire game. That seemed close to blasphemy at a ballgame to me.
We didn’t use it often, but one gameday there I was in my navy blazer and blue shirt and red tie and penny loafers, surrounded by other primly dressed diners talking in soft voices like they were in a fine restaurant. Suddenly, the door to the club blasted inward so hard I thought it was going to come off its hinges and fly across the room. A middle-aged man with salt-and-pepper hair and the shadow of a beard had just barged in, wearing shorts, a disheveled Hawaiian shirt, and a yacht captain’s hat askew on his head by about 45 degrees. He was making an extraordinary amount of noise, moving through the crowd of diners and greeting everyone with a loud shout or laugh and a vigorous handshake, and everyone was watching him.
It was Ted Turner, and when he came up to our table, he not only greeted my parents boisterously by name, but me and my brother, too! I was pretty impressed by that, almost as much as his spectacular lack of decorum in terms of his dress and behavior. He moved on to another table after a few minutes, and I leaned over to my dad. “Why isn’t he following the rules? Isn’t it his club?” I asked naively. And my dad said knowingly but very quietly, “well, I think likes to show people that the rules don’t apply to him, even when he makes the rules.”
Ted Turner, in many ways, is the epitome of what we in the United States usually think of as an entrepreneur: bold, visionary, unfettered by conventionality; ultra-confident, ultra-competitive, ultra-charismatic; completely committed to his ideas and goals, even (and perhaps especially) when everyone else thinks they’re crazy. The definitive biography on Turner, not surprisingly, is entitled Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way. But the same basic description and story also applies to Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos, and all the way back to the robber barons of the late 19th and early 20th century.
And yes, this archetype is always a man, despite obvious examples of women as highly accomplished entrepreneurs like Estee Lauder, Oprah Winfrey, and Rihanna, who is one of only about 30 self-made billionaires in the entire world under 40 years old! But I think that’s because we have always seen entrepreneurs through the mythology of the American Cowboy: rugged, freedom-loving men who are totally committed to their work, who rely solely on their own skills and grit, and who are risk-takers who never back down from a fight. That mythos of the Great American Cowboy gets overlaid onto the Great American Entrepreneur to create that archetype of a man whose singular vision and drive stops at nothing to achieve the goals they believe in: daring every risk, never backing down form a fight, and persevering through every adversity until they accomplish what they believe in.
The truth about both cowboys and entrepreneurs is quite different from mythology, though. Real-life cowboys actually lived and worked in groups, not alone; they were beholden to the ranchers who owned the cattle they drove; and most of them never shot at anything besides the occasional coyote that got too close to their herds. In the same way, most actual entrepreneurs work collaboratively as a team, not as one visionary individual with a collection of minions around him. They work systematically, not recklessly; taking huge, uncalculated risks based on a gut feeling is a terrible way to be a successful entrepreneur. The successful entrepreneur takes necessary risks that are calculated to succeed based on careful study and observation. They discern, in other words; they discern what is the best way forward by examining the opportunities in the midst of uncertainties, and determining which are most likely to be fruitful and, therefore, worth the risk.
Discernment is at the very heart of both entrepreneurship and discipleship. “Present your bodies as a living sacrifice,” Paul urges the Romans, “holy and acceptable to God….do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of the mind, so that you may discern what is the will of God – what is good, and acceptable, and perfect.” Now, this passage is a prime example of why, when I was a Teaching Assistant in New Testament Greek at Princeton Seminary, I made my students translate the second person singular as “y’all.” Yes, you can substitute “youse,” but when you think about it, the emphasis of “youse” is what it sounds like: youse comes from simply adding a plural “s” on the end of “you,” which is a group of individuals. “Y’all” puts the emphasis on the “all,” on the collective group, not the individual “yous” who make it up.
And yes, that’s getting pretty far in the semantic weeds, but it does make a substantive difference here. It is not, “each of you should not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of the mind, so that each of you may discern what is the will of God for yourselves,” but “don’t y’all be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of the mind, so that y’all may discern what is the will of God together.” Do you hear the difference? Discernment is not the work of a singular, gifted individual, nor of each of us on our own, but of a collaborative community. It is “all y’all,” as they say in Texas, where they of course need a plural that is bigger than just “y’all.”
And honestly, can you really imagine actually trying to discern the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect, all on your own? I’m always amazed at people who say things like, “The Lord has convicted me to tell you that what you’re doing is wrong.” Really? You’re absolutely sure that it is God who has decided this, and decided that you should be the messenger of it, and it just happens to align perfectly with your own self-interest or prior convictions or general desire to project authority? As the writer Annie Lamott puts it, “You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people that you do.” That’s not discernment; that’s projection, and it has been used repeatedly over the centuries to justify some of the church’s worst practices and beliefs and behaviors.
Which is exactly why Paul immediately warns against such behavior after calling the community to discern the will of God. “I say to everyone among you,” he proclaims (to every individual this time, not just “y’all”), “I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned.” Don’t think so highly of yourself that you fool yourself into believing you can discern the will of God on your own, in other words.
Think together, discern together what is good and acceptable and perfect, combining your strengths and mitigating your shortcomings by each contributing the fullness of who they are and what they have. That’s why he then goes on to this familiar point about the church being like one body with many members, many body parts, each of which has a special ability and none of which can thrive on its own. We need prophets, by which he means preachers, and ministers, by which he means caregiving in the sense of deacons, and teachers, and encouragers, and givers, and leaders, and compassionate ones, all working together to discern God’s will.
If you only had leaders, or only had givers, or only had teachers, or whatever, crucial insights would be missing and the group would quickly become lost in the wilderness rather than finding the way God intends through an “off-road faith.” And then he goes on to encourage the church to practice the disciplines of mutual love, faithfulness, and service that will keep them together as a community in the midst of their discernment.
That is why the church as a community is, first and finally, a blessing from God. That is not to say that the church does not get things wrong or do things wrong. It does; a lot. But when you are following an off-road faith, a faith that does not have clearly defined, universal steps, to the point that even its most basic practices are taught with all the specificity of “love God with your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself,” it really helps to have others with you on the journey to help each other figure out, discern, what that means for you and for them in this specific place and time with these people.
We are not just a collection of individuals; we are a community striving to be faithful to God’s call to us, which means we need one another. To attempt otherwise is like trying to play a team sport as one person: no matter how good a pitcher you may be, the other team is going to put the ball in play, and you won’t be able to field it. So, whoever we are, however we got here, let us gather at Christ’s table together, and go from this place to discern our way forward together, trusting that God is among us and before us, leading us together every step of the way.