Pub Theology 5/21/24 — Team players, teamwork, and tug o’ war
Every week we start our discussion with an ice breaker question or two. Originally, the idea was to make everyone comfortable with talking and sharing their thoughts with each other before diving into the evening’s topic. After 11 years of Tuesday conversations, though, we’re all pretty much comfortable talking about pretty much anything. But the ice breakers remain.
And that’s a good thing, because as we were chatting about the ice breaker last week, one of our number chimed in with something like: “Wow, that would make a great discussion topic.” Others around the table nodded in assent, so here we are. Last week’s ice breaker is the heart of this week’s conversation.
The question was a simple one: Do you consider yourself a team player? Why or why not? Not surprisingly, we proceeded to take a superficially simple question and highlight a host of the complexities and nuances embedded within it. So that’s what we’re going to focus on in this week’s conversation. Not just are you a team player, but what makes a good team, and what then makes a good team player? What are our experiences in working with others as part of a team, whether at work, in social settings, sports, voluntary organizations like churches, and so on? Recognizing that it’s never only one or the other, have our experiences been mainly positive or mainly negative? And what does teamwork mean to each of us?
Finally, the game of tug o’ war is often thought of as one of the classic demonstrations of the power of teamwork. Simply put, if everyone pulls together you’ve got a good chance of winning, even if the other side has more physically powerful players. So what do you think of the idea of tug o’ war as an exemplar for teamwork? Is it really as simple as I just made it out to be? Or is there more to it? And then think about tug o’war as a larger metaphor. After all, what is it if not being pulled one way or another? Are there times when you’ve felt caught in a tug o’war? Why was that, and what helped resolve the issue for you?
We’ll talk about all of this and likely more in our conversation tomorrow evening, Tuesday May 21. The discussion starts at 7pm at Casa Real in downtown Oxford.
