The Ken Mills Principle

I started as the youth pastor in October of 1998, the fall after graduating from seminary, in Belgrade, Montana. The church was then called Belgrade Community Church, and I was the youth pastor in growing community located 10 miles from the college city of Bozeman, MT.

Ken Mills (along with Pat Ramler) were the Sunday School teachers for the high school class. We had a Friday night hike to the M in Bozeman planned. I think we billed it as a "midnight hike". We would leave about 9:30, get to the trailhead a little after 10, get organized, and start hiking until we got to the top of the trail, and overlook the city in the middle of the night. We would have a few songs and a brief devotion, and enjoy God's creation as we looked over the Gallatin Valley.

I was keeping my eye on the weather. A possible thunderstorm was forecast for the evening. I wondered if we should continue to hike. I called Ken.

"Well, I suppose you can call off the hike on the account of a potential storm, but if you cancel activities based on potential bad weather around here, you will not really ever get much done," Ken said, "If a storm comes during the hike, we can always change plans then."

I came to the conclusion that Ken was right. He knew the kids. He knew the land. I trusted him that evening. The storm didn't come. It was a great night.

As I have went along in ministry and in life, I have found that the Ken Mills principle is a good way to approach not just weather concerns in ministry, but ministry and life more generally.

If you scuttle your plans because of potential complications that may arise, you might as well sit on your rear end, never do anything, and wait to die.

This week our family has been talking about plans. What should we do regarding summer vacation? Do we plan for the kids to be in school full-time in the fall or not? Should I officiate a wedding next spring? The questions go on and on. There is so much uncertainty. And the kids are wondering, should we just stay in a holding pattern? It is like planning a midnight hike with a 50 percent chance of rain.

And Ken Mills principle keeps running through my mind. If you hold off on plans based on a potential storm, you will probably never really get very much done. So, we have to move forward. Use precautions when necessary, yes. Consider back up plans, of course. But you can't just hide from a possibility of a storm that may never come.

The Ken Mills principle applies to how we approach congregational leadership as pastors, and how congregations approach their ministries as a congregation. This is especially true in 2020. We have taken time as a society to hunker down to protect ourselves and others from a disease. Might even have to do that again. However, we can't plan our ministries based upon worse-case scenarios. We have to live. We have to step up and step out, even if that means we might have to make changes later.

Fleeting thoughts I needed to write out before they escaped my mind. Maybe I will develop them better at a later date.