The Infinite Game
By Brian Sanders
In his book, Finite and Infinite Games, historian James Carse applies the compelling metaphor of life as play and these two very different forms that our ambition takes. He explains, “A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play. Finite games are those instrumental activities - from sports to politics to wars - in which the participants obey rules, recognize boundaries and announce winners and losers. The infinite game - there is only one - includes any authentic interaction, from touching to culture, that changes rules, plays with boundaries, and exists solely for the purpose of continuing the game. A finite player seeks power; the infinite one displays self-sufficient strength.”
In this sense, our work in principled fields like ministry, social service, charity, and nonprofits, can devolve into a finite game. We can find ourselves competing with each other for funding, attention, and significance.
Yet, that interpersonal and interagency competition can betray our original calling. For most of us, the reason we took these roles in the first place was to play the infinite game. And finding our way back to our own origin story can be key to remembering our transcendent, shared cause.
Nowhere is this misalignment more clear and more profoundly debilitating than between churches. I am a devout Christian and have spent most of my career working with and around churches. People organize into churches in pursuit of God and for the sake of the wider world. Still, it does not take long for the social grouping with its particularities, to become more important than that initial mission. It is so easy to perceive other churches, their leaders, their people, and their differences, as a threat to us.
Collaboration becomes harder not because it is unbiblical (the call to unity is one of the strongest themes in the New Testament) but because we are afraid of so many things. I am not sure how to overcome that except to find our collective purpose again. To see something as so important, so worthwhile that we overlook our suspicion and fear to risk collaboration. Part of why we do not collaborate is because we have lost sight of the stakes. A unified church, drilled and skilled in collaboration, proposes to be a rising tide for every other social collaboration.
Every known evil, every intractable problem in the world, falls within the purview of the church. Of course, not every individual church (even the biggest church) can address every problem. But a coalition of churches, acting in service and for the well-being of their city could. Every problem could be touched. And in turn, a failure in unity means each of our most pressing social problems and the people trying to address them; homelessness, addiction, child welfare, mental health, unemployment, and racism, are left to fight on their own.
Jesus himself made the claim that even unbelief would not be overcome without collaboration. In his most famous recorded prayer, he made that breathtaking connection. “My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me.”
Christians believe that in the death and resurrection of Jesus there is an archetype for the redemption of all things. Our leader and Lord laid down his life for the least, the last, and the lost. He dies because he loves. He dies to forgive, reconcile and redeem not just people but the world itself. This image should drive those of us who claim to follow Jesus toward that certain hope. The final book of the New Testament culminates with Jesus declaring what was the transcendent purpose of all his work, from the fall until now, “Behold, I make all things new.” You do not have to hold any religious faith to long for the renewal of all things.
In every worthwhile collaboration, there is an infinite game to be served. Or maybe, as Carse has argued, they are all aspects of the one infinite game. We all have looked at the world through the eyes of compassion and justice, finding something about the way things are to be less than they should be. And for those of us who have offered our own careers and creativity to these considerable problems we hope for something better. More than that, we believe that something better is possible.
Even the most jaded among us often nurture a lingering hope that persists even in the face of failure and futility. This hope reflects the infinite game of redemption. To see something that is broken, be made whole. To see people flourishing where they were once diminished. The infinite game is not something we can win or even play alone. Because it is something that started well before we got here and which will carry on long after we are gone. And in that sense, the infinite game is a collaboration across time.
The work of compassion you do today is linked to Dorothy Day, Mother Teresa, Martin King, Nelson Mandela and Francis of Assisi because they were playing the infinite game before we were. Transcendence is not just unity of purpose in the room of collaboration we may sit in today. It is the unity of purpose in the worldwide theater of collaboration, where we have all been assigned a part.
You might be able to do some collaborative work without a transcendent idea, but as partners, in a finite game, the relationships will be threatened by self-interest and small-minded, temporary goals. If, on the other hand, we can remember and celebrate our partnership in the infinite game, not only will we forge a potent and lasting collaboration, we will sleep better at night.
Remembering not just our own reasons why, and not just the shared purpose of our collaborative community but remembering that we are a part of a timeless struggle for redemption. This struggle for redemption, which is driven by faith, hope, and love, is the final and perhaps most profound key to collaboration.