The Trilemma: Something to Remember When Judging Others

During my last semester of college I took a class in project management. In one of the lectures a slide was shown which showed a triangle. The words “Time”, “Cost”, and “Quality” were each written on one of the corners. The short version of the lecture which could be placed as a caption at the bottom was, “Pick two”. The idea was that whenever you are providing a product or a service, people want it cheap, fast, and of high quality. However, you cannot deliver fully in one of these areas without compromising another. If you try to make a product cheaply and quickly, it will negatively affect the quality. If you try to make a product of premium quality, it will make it more expensive and take longer to produce. You get the idea; it is impossible to please everyone. It does not matter how powerful the company is or how talented its employees are, there are simply physical limitations to what can be done.

Remembering this lesson has helped me in my faith crisis as well. It is very easy to be critical of the church and its leaders. One common complaint in the disaffected community is that the church is not open and candid enough about the less pleasant aspects of church history. It is a fair criticism; many people who leave the church over historical issues often comment that the church’s apparent sweeping-under-the-rug of these issues is worse than the issues themselves. Perhaps had they learned about these things in Sunday school rather than from outside sources it would have been less of a challenge to their testimonies. I agree that the church could be more open about these things, but it is important to remember that there is a cost involved as well. It would better serve the needs of some members, but hurt others. So, as a church leader, what do you do? Stick to the bread and butter gospel lessons and ignore the difficult questions that some of the struggling members have, or cater to the needs of those with difficult questions at the risk of creating doubts in others that they wouldn’t experience otherwise? There will be casualties on either side. There is no solution that will perfectly serve the needs of all the individuals in the church.

These dilemmas exist at every level of decision making in the church. When planning youth activities, do you plan fun activities that will be well attended, but lack spiritual depth, or do you plan deep and meaningful experiences that may be less popular? Do we lower our baptismal and temple recommend requirements to make the church feel more comfortable and welcoming to potential converts and others who are struggling and risk moral laziness among the rest of our members, or do we keep them high and risk alienating those who fall short? Do we continue to emphasize the nuclear family as the ideal and risk hurting those who are divorced, single, or unable to have children, or do we instead choose to turn away from this emphasis and by so doing cheapen the importance of the traditional family? Please understand that as I present these problems, I am not saying that it has to be one way or the other. We can take an approach falls anywhere in between in most cases. What I am saying, is that it is impossible to serve both sides fully; there will always be a compromise.

While at the corporate level the church may choose to pick whichever side will help the most members (and as a side effect hurt those who are the outliers), one wonderful thing to remember is that when we serve at the local level it does not need to be this way. The church needs all kinds of people to function. There is not one right way to fulfill any calling. The zealous and hard-lining mission president may be just the thing one missionary needs, but the spirit-of-the-law zone leader may be the one who reaches another. The deep and contemplative scoutmaster will help deepen the testimonies of many of the youth, while the fun and charismatic young men’s leader may be the one to get the two or three kids that never come out to start attending again. We are all part of the body of Christ. We all serve a unique function and are able to reach certain people in ways that others cannot. As the church grows larger and larger and brings in more and more cultures, it will become less and less practical to address the unique challenges and circumstances of all individuals at a church-wide level. Rather than complain about what the church is not doing, perhaps we can be a little more proactive in filling those individual needs which our own experiences have prepared us for.