pray like a dog

Last week I was looking for evidence online that the interpretation of the parable of the minas espoused by my theology instructor is a thing. (Note mostly to self: the internet is not, as a rule, a good source for well-argued theology.) And I ran across this sermon by a certain Nathan Nettleton, who is (or at least was, in 2008) a pastor in Melborne, Australia. His sermon contains these two paragraphs, which I absolutely love:

I can illustrate this beautifully from my dog training hobby. On most Saturday mornings I teach people how to train their dogs. Twenty years ago, most dog training was done by punishing mistakes. If we wanted a dog to walk at heel, we jerked it around with a choker collar whenever it moved away from the position we wanted. You can get a dog to heel that way, but the dog will heel because it is scared of making a mistake and invoking your angry jerk on the chain. One of the big problems with that method is that when a dog that is scared of making mistakes can’t quite work out what you want, it panics. It doesn’t know what is the right thing to do, and it is terrified of doing the wrong thing, so what does it do? It freezes. It reduces the risk of doing the wrong thing by avoiding doing anything at all. Just like the bloke in our story. 

Nowadays an increasing number of dog trainers train differently by ignoring mistakes and rewarding successes. A dog that has experienced very few punishments and fully expects to be rewarded has a very different attitude. If I stand still and say nothing in front of Dusty with a treat visible in my hand, he’s got no idea what he has to do to get me to give him the reward, but he doesn’t freeze. He begins offering me behaviours. He sits. He lies down. He rolls over. He sits up and begs. He jumps over something. Why? Because he’s not expecting to get whacked for getting it wrong; he’s enthusiastically trying everything in the hope of getting something right. He doesn’t expect bad consequences; he expects good ones.

This, this, this! As applied to church, and also parenting. I mean...I have absolutely no idea how true this is. I imagine that to train a dog you have to prove yourself as leader of the pack, and that can't be accomplished entirely through treats. But how often in church are we paralyzed by the fear of doing or saying something wrong? What if we approached the whole thing with the enthusiasm of Dusty?  What would that look like? 💕🐶🐶