What ‘The Island Game’ reveals about your thinking

The lifting of coronavirus restrictions over the summer months has made church life feel refreshingly more normal.

Singing is back. Sunday school is back. Perhaps you’ve even been the happy recipient of that greatest of golden tickets – the invitation to Sunday lunch. That said, if you’ve spent the last 18 months munching through the entire contents of Netflix, it’s possible that your conversational skills are a little rusty. What was it that people used to talk about? But fear not. Here to save you from stilted small talk, let me introduce you to a favourite conversational pastime that I like to call The Island Game. The scenario you pose as you pass the roasted spuds across the dinner table is this: you’re going to be stranded on a desert island for a year (maybe two). You will be rescued, but you need to survive until you are. You can take five fellow church members with you. Who are you going to pick?

Go on – don’t read any further. Try it.

For the avoidance of doubt, it’s important to underline that this isn’t an apocalypse scenario so there’s no need to repopulate the earth. That is a sure-fire way to make the conversation get very weird very quickly. Played right, The Island Game is a good-natured celebration of all the great people you have in your midst who could be relied upon in a crisis. The right attitude is essential – no one wants to be stuck on the island with a whinger. So you’re looking for resilient can-do types, and preferably ones who won’t stir up conflict. Humour is important. Plus, you probably want to bring an Alpha who can take charge, unless that’s going to be you. Power struggles don’t end well – look at Lord of the Flies.

But what I’ve found fascinating from my extensive trialling is the different way that men and women tend to approach the question. To start with, everyone’s minds immediately go to the church members with practical skills and brute strength. Such people are, almost inevitably, male. Building shelters, hunting animals, lighting fires, hauling drinking water – it’s a lot of physical labour. For this reason, tradesmen often get the call up first. Failing that, camping experience is a plus. So is evidence of a successful DIY extension or bathroom upgrade.

Gender difference

Here’s where the gender difference comes in. The guys I’ve played with will tend to fill up their five slots along these lines, often (though by no means always) ending up with an all-male line-up. The women, however, having filled the first three or four slots with men who can carry stuff, will then get to the point where they say: ‘Oh, and then I’ll need some women to keep me sane.’ An all-male line-up is out of the question.

It’s just a bit of fun for Sunday lunch, but in some ways The Island Game strikes me as a litmus test of our complementarian instincts. If we truly believe that men and women are complementary to one another – that men are better men with women around, and women are better women with men around – then surely we’d be fools to go to the Island without both. If we believe what we read in Genesis 1–2, then a society – whether of six or six million – needs both men and women in order to flourish (and not just in order to procreate).

What’s interesting is that the relative physical strengths and weaknesses of men and women make this truth obvious in one direction, but not always in the other. I’ve never heard a woman suggest an all-female line up – it’s just obvious that in a survival situation, you’d want some men around. But it’s not always obvious why women would be likewise essential.

And I wonder if we’re at risk of thinking similarly in the church. The way we tend to think about ministry and the roles of men and women in complementarian churches makes the essentiality of the ministry of men pretty obvious. Do we say the same about the ministry of women?