What Dip do you need to push through?
Lessons from the book “The Dip” for Pioneers
I love the book “The Dip” by Seth Godin.1 It’s maybe one of the shortest books I’ve ever read, but it has some great reminders about how life works. And while it’s not a ministry book, I see a lot of parallels to pioneering work that we should not ignore.
The basic premise is that anything worth doing is going to have a “dip” associated with it. There is going to be a slog at some point that you have to push through to see the benefit on the other side. A practical example is: To be a doctor, you have to push through the dip of medical school. Or simpler: To be a great musician, you have to push through the dip of practicing every day.
Towards the end, Godin has a list of the types of dips you might run into, and I think the three below specifically relate to Pioneering work.
Relationship Dip
There are people and organizations that can help you later but only if you invest the time and effort to work with them now, even though now is not necessarily the easy time for you to do it. … Those shortsighted people who are always eager for a favor or a break never manage to get through the Relationship Dip, because they didn’t invest in relationships back when it was difficult (but not urgent).
I wrote earlier about how Pioneers can’t go it alone. This is exactly that. You’ll get stuck at some point. We all do. And if you have not invested in relationships along the way, you’ll probably stay stuck.
Ego Dip
When it’s all about you, it’s easier. Giving up control and leaning into the organization gives you leverage. Most people can’t do this; they can’t give up control or the spotlight. They get stuck in the dip.
We have to be willing to serve others. Are we willing to lean into others, knowing that through serving them, we might see more lives changed for eternity?
Jesus said that only if a grain of wheat dies will it bear much fruit. He also said that anyone who wants to be first should be the last of all. But so many modern ministry paradigms are the antithesis of this: They focus on one or a few key leaders. We have to give up being at the top, being known, or desiring to be noticed to see the fruit that we really want to see.
And here I think is the biggest Dip:
Conceptual Dip
You got this far operating under one set of assumptions. Abandoning those assumptions and embracing a new, bigger set may be exactly what you need to get to the next level.
So much of ministry falls into traditions. Even the most cutting-edge brand-new type of work quickly falls into “this is how we do things.” We need to constantly come back to the Word, hold it as primary, and let all other traditions go.
My friend Rodger shared an interesting post last year2 about the development of movement paradigms. It was from a group of people thinking through paradigm shifts related to pursuing the multiplication of disciples and churches. The temptation is to take a look at the two columns in the chart he provided, and think that the “currently” side is the one we should follow. But… the chart in that post is now 20 years old.
Two questions:
Has the world changed since then? (cough, global pandemic).
What context was this document written for?
We need to continually come back to the Word as our ultimate authority, and also realize we have some deep conceptual dips, usually related to our traditions, to push through on our way to effectiveness.
The principles of Scripture are going to work in any context; I have full confidence in that. However, we often ignore the work required to push through a conceptual dip. Instead, we take tools and training from another context, apply them to our own without any processing or prayer, and then are surprised when they don’t work. We may need to drop our familiar tools, do the hard work of searching Scripture for the principles, and then apply them to our life and ministry.
This is a lesson that each generation of pioneers needs to learn. We can and should learn from past pioneers. We should learn from their vision to see God’s Kingdom expand. We should learn from how past pioneers let Scripture inform everything they did.
But we may not be able to learn from their exact methodologies and practices, because contexts vary so much. And they vary quickly, the context today is vastly different from what it was even 10 years ago.
Here’s to another day of pushing through a dip in your pioneering work, whatever it might be.
Godin, S. (2007). The Dip. Penguin Publishing Group.
