Matt and Dan contemplate the great Asian inheritance: failure. The failure to live up to expectations, the failure to make your parents proud, the failure to become the person your aunties have already told everyone you are. And, of course, the failure to be a good Christian, which is particularly embarrassing when you have a theology degree.

Provoked by another podcast’s insightful investigations into the subject, our intrepid hosts venture into the cultural, existential and spiritual dimensions of failure. Along the way, they encounter the contemporary performance society, that relentless machinery of optimisation, productivity and self-improvement that has somehow found its way into the Church.

Here, faithfulness is quietly demoted in favour of success, pastors become CEOs, spiritual disciplines become KPIs, and even grace starts to feel like something you ought to be getting better at.

The result? Burnout, spiritual exhaustion, and the creeping suspicion that God might be disappointed in your quarterly results.

But what if failure is not simply an obstacle to overcome, a lesson to learn, or a testimony to repackage into an inspirational conference talk? What if failure is where our illusions of competence finally collapse, and we begin to discover what God actually asks of us? From the biblical history of spectacularly unsuccessful people to the strange, scandalous logic of the Cross, Matt and Dan consider how failure might be woven into the very fabric of salvation history, both collectively and individually.

Perhaps the Christian life is not an endless ascent towards spiritual excellence but a slow, humiliating, occasionally hilarious discovery that God’s faithfulness does not depend on our ability to keep the curry hot.

And when the curry runs dry, there may yet be grace enough for a second helping.

Resources

The Pilgrim Soul: Failure

Jack Maden: Byung-Chul Han's Burnout Society