The other day, I was watching some engineers at work try to solve a problem.

It was really sad and funny. There was no manager involved, and I was only there because they wanted a "test engineer" to give input on the quality side of things. You could say this was quite the diverse group. One was a female, one was Polish, one was Chinese. One was a Buddhist, one a "Christian", one Catholic. Sure enough, one was in their 40's, one in their late 30's and one had just turned 30.

You could probably have picked a more diverse group, but not by much more. And they were trying to solve a simple problem, having to do with finding where in their shared code a particular error was happening.

One wanted to just put in extra lines of code that echo'd out where in the code you were at any one time, probably the most simple solution, quick and over with. One wanted to build this elaborate logging engine that laid on top of the code, so if this ever happened again the logging would detect it sooner. The third was the compromiser, who thought maybe we could do the simple thing now and implement the more heavy handed approach later. All three sounded reasonable up until this point, and that is when the fireworks started.

The "simple" person and the "heavy" person both spent large amounts of time and volume trying to convince the compromiser that he should lean their respective ways. Apparently since he was willing to compromise at all, then he must be "partly convinced" and if he could be made wholly convinced it would be 2 to I and whichever way he leaned would "win" the argument. And an argument it was - what started as a discussion between three respected and respecting peers became a competition, where the original problem was pretty much forgotten in favor of who's will or reasoning was able to overcome the others.

You know how this winds up, don't you? In the end, one of them "won out" and then all three had to go implement the change. They were supposed to work on it together. But it didn't work. The person who "lost" went ahead and did exactly what he planned all along. The ugly part came when the product bug was found - but the product performance took a huge hit with all this wacky, conflicting extra code. The manager got them into a room and told them to YANK IT ALL OUT and that was the end of all their efforts.

You know, we here are quite a diverse group. Some are old, some are young, some are mature (whatever that is) and some are kidders. Some are rich, some are poor, some are frugal, some are spendthrifts. Yes we are a diverse bunch of people. BUT imagine if we had no elders. Every member here, the Christians, has equal say in the business we conduct. Hopefully we are reasonable people, and respect each other. And it would likely appear that way right up until we had to decide something not clear cut by scripture.

I mean, I would hope we'd all agree that we should support preachers. But when we get new carpet, what color will it be? What kind? You will get those who want one color, those who want another, and those who will try to compromise. This is fine until you discover how mulish brother John is - and sister Suzie is so contrary she'll argue its midnight at high noon! Where did all these difficult people come from!?! And then there are those who know what's right but are too shy to stand up to the charismatic, loud brother who is telling us the emperor has beautiful clothes. Or whatever Mike says, he's the preacher (since there are no elders, the preacher takes over, right? Right?)

Yikes! It's God's plan that we have elders to save us from ourselves! Long life to Mo, Janet, Wally, and Sandy!

Randy