Lessons for congregations from the collapse of the NY Mets
Monday Ministerial Musings
By Rev. Mark William Ennis
2025 Blog #39
September 29, 2025
Lessons for congregations from the collapse of the NY Mets
My favorite baseball team, The NY Mets, were eliminated from postseason play last evening. It is a disappointment to us who are life-long Mets fans who were optimistic at the beginning of the season. Some of us who watched the Mets carefully the year are not surprised. Despite the huge payroll, there were signs early in the season, that the Mets did not have a championship caliber team. I think that there are lessons for all of us as individuals and for the faith communities who struggle to be faithful.
Lesson One: Money isn’t everything.
The Mets did not have the highest payroll this season, but they were close. Our payroll in 2025 was second only to the Los Angeles Dodgers. The Mets did have the highest payroll in baseball in 2023 and 2024 but still did not have great success. In 2023 the Mets did not get to the playoffs despite the high payroll. We made it to the playoffs in 2024 but were eliminated in the first round.
Money is certainly a great asset and gives us more choices in life. I would like to have more money so that I can bless more missions, but money isn’t the only factor. Too often in my life I’ve also seen faith communities who put too much faith in money. We sometimes hold ourselves back from doing good work because we believe that we don’t have enough money to do great things. Sometimes the answer is to do small things with the money we have rather than waiting for a huge fortune before we do anything at all.
Money isn’t a magic wand.
Lesson Two: It is possible to have two many stars.
Before the start of this season there was great excitement with the coming of Juan Soto to the Mets from the Yankees. The thinking in bringing one more star onto the roster was that we were close to having a championship season in 2024 and that just one more star would bring us over the top in 2025. This didn’t work. Perhaps we had too many stars and not enough teamwork. Individual statistics were great. Pete Alonso passed Darryl Strawberry as the all-time Mets homerun hitter. Likewise, Juan Soto had some great numbers during the season. He had 42 homeruns and drove in 105 runs. It was a great individual performance.
Despite these stars doing so well, the Mets scored fewer runs in 2025 than they did in 2024. I wonder if it was wise of the Mets management to invest so much in stars rather than building a team that can play as a team. We live in an age of celebrities but sometimes it is better to have fewer “stars” and more people who can work well together.
Faith communities can work like this also. There are times when congregations wait for “the right person” to come in and be a hero. Often, we don’t need a star or a hero. We simply need to use the people we have, the assets we have, and work together as a team. Sometimes we have too many heroes and not enough team players.
Perhaps people who can work as a team are more important than superstars.
Lesson Three: A team must be balanced
The Mets put a great deal of money into hitters for the 2025 season, but I think that because of this, pitching was neglected. Our pitching started out strong, and carried the team for the first part of the season, but the pitching collapsed. Yes, some of the collapse was from injuries, but from what I can see, too much money was put into acquiring hitters and not enough placed into quality pitching and we paid the price for this.
The lesson in this is that any team, even in churches, needs to be balanced. Can you imagine an effective congregation if preaching is great but pastoral care and mission are horrible? We need a balance of many factors.
I hope that our congregations learn from this Mets collapse.
#ReformedChurchInAmerica # BergenCounty,NJ
#www.PastorMarkAuthor.com #www.revmarkwilliamennis.com
#GlenRock,NJ #CommunityChurchofGlenRock
#HealthyCongregations #NYMets