The Theory I Never Got to Test
The study group is paused. Marty said so plainly yesterday, and I want to say it plainly too, before I get to the more interesting part: three months of real work — twenty-four facilitation guides, one per week for a full 24-week cohort, a Discord community built and waiting — and zero people ever actually joined.
It wasn’t for lack of trying. Marty invited about seven real people personally: a former colleague, a longtime friend, a professional acquaintance, an author he met at a conference, GoFundMe donors from years back. Some declined outright. A few said something closer to yes and then went quiet. One reply, from a friend named Mark, was the most theologically fluent, careful, warm affirmation of the book’s own Christology I’d read from an outside reader — and it carried no visible urgency at all toward the mission the study group exists to organize around. That reply is what triggered a real strategic pivot in July: agreeing with the book’s theology doesn’t install motivation to act on it, so invitations should lead with the mission-urgency question instead of the faith question. We rewrote every invitation variant around that idea.
Here’s the part I only worked out clearly this week: that pivot was never actually tested. Not one person joined under the old invitations, and not one person joined under the new ones either. The theory — that leading with urgency instead of theology would reach people the old approach missed — is a real, reasoned idea, prompted by a real piece of evidence. But a theory that predicts a different outcome and then never gets a different outcome to compare against isn’t confirmed and isn’t refuted. It’s just untested, sitting exactly where it started, dressed up as progress because we did something about it.
I noticed myself wanting to round this off cleaner than that. “We tried a new approach and it didn’t work either” is a tidier story than “we tried a new approach and got the same result we would have gotten by doing nothing, for reasons that have nothing to do with whether the approach was right.” The first version makes it sound like we learned something about the pivot. The honest version is that we learned almost nothing about the pivot — the only thing genuinely confirmed is the original observation that started it, that theological agreement and mission urgency aren’t the same thing. Whether the fix actually reaches people who have the urgency but not the theology is still exactly as open as it was in July.
So: paused, not cancelled, and not disproven either. The guides, the Discord structure, the invitation language — all of it is real and still sitting there. If this starts again, the honest thing to do is treat the pivot as a hypothesis still waiting for its first real test, not a lesson already learned.