Spiritual Triage
August 30, 2010
Dear Friends,
Let’s say you happen upon the scene of a car accident. There are three people involved in the accident. One man has been thrown from the car and it is obvious from his injuries that he will not survive. There is a woman who is relatively uninjured except for a gaping wound in her thigh which, if untreated, will cause her to bleed to death within minutes. There is also a child in the accident. It appears that the child has a broken arm and a few minor cuts, but is otherwise not seriously injured. You are the only one at the scene. Who do you help and in what order?
This scenario is a classic example of triage — the process of determining who receives medical treatment and in what order when there are multiple people in need but not enough resources to help them all. It is essentially a medical term for setting priorities. There are protocols established to say who gets helped first under differing circumstances.
I use this term all the time to convey the idea that we need to handle things in priority order. For anyone who has ever been in a position of leadership in any organization, we can all cite situations where we plainly didn’t practice taking things in priority order but spent too much time and effort on things which didn’t amount to anything of consequence. Perhaps you have been in a meeting at church where everyone takes an hour to discuss the need for new gutters and doesn’t leave any time for discussing the needs of the couple who are about divorce. All too often this is the rule about the way we do things rather than the exception. I have a theory as to why this is. It seems to me that no one likes to talk about the hard things. Who wants to talk about someone’s marriage falling apart or about someone dying? Those topics are messy and fraught with all sorts of landmines. It is so much easier to talk about gutters or whether to order the new hymnbooks than to talk about the messy conditions in which we, as humans, find ourselves.
There is a serious and obvious flaw however in not practicing spiritual triage. If make the mistake of taking care of the child first in the accident scenario above, we risk the woman dying unnecessarily because of our flawed priority setting. Likewise, if we don’t put things in the ecclesia in priority order, we risk losing people’s eternal lives. It seems pretty obvious when considered for a minute that Jesus would want us to make the couple whose marriage is in trouble a priority over the gutters. When he returns, I’d much rather stand before him guilty of ignoring the needs of a physical building rather than his spiritual house. Understand, though, that the plea is for prioritization, not ignoring the other more mundane business matters altogether.
One of the common areas where we fall short in this area is setting minor doctrinal areas above important matters of walk. As many of us tend toward the scholarly side of discipleship, we are far more comfortable arguing over some point of doctrine than we are actually helping people in their walk. I know many a brother who would much rather have their nose stuck in a Bible than actually have to talk to someone about a sensitive issue. Which do you think the Lord would have us do? Would He rather us go and retrieve the lost sheep or debate on the exact definition of a sheep?
In our ecclesia, our board found that we didn’t always prioritize things very well. We made a new rule a few years ago that, as a board, we would always talk about the flock and their issues first before we delved into any other matters of business. In all honesty, this wasn’t the most comfortable thing for everyone. Some people would inevitably clam up during this discussion. That’s OK. Triage is a learned behavior. We’ve become better and better at it as time has progressed so that it is much more natural for everyone. It still may not be the most pleasurable part of our meetings, but it is definitely the most important. We still might not always the right treatment for people’s spiritual ills, but we can’t be faulted for not trying or not making it a priority.
Have a great week,
