Audio Recording
I don’t deal with change very well. I have my little agoraphobic world that I
subsist in where everything’s the way I’m used to it. I may not like it, but it is what I’m
used to. Don’t change it. Suggest the least little bit of change to me
and I immediately construct the long list of reasons against it. For example, I work at a very cluttered
little desk in the corner of the kitchen.
Since I started working again last April Dana has often suggested that I
would be happier if I moved my “office” back up to the attic. It was up there initially when we first moved
to Owen Sound but after a year it became her sewing space that rarely gets
used. The pro’s to this decision far
outweigh the con’s. A couple of hours
and I’m up there. Sure, there would be a
few minor bugs to work out in the new routine.
So why don’t I just do it? Well,
my it don’t change. Can anybody relate? Do I hear an “Amen”?
Change…you know, the change itself, isn’t the real
culprit when it comes to our reluctance to change things. Change, whether good or bad, is a fact of
life. It happens with regularity. It’s
not the change that’s difficult. It’s
the transition that occurs as we adjust from the way things used to be to a new
reality, a reality that is a huge unknown.
When a change happens it inevitably means we have to let go of some
thing’s in our selves and in our identity, and start doing things a different
way, and at some point eventually accept a new it and a new identity. If I
were to move my office up to the attic the view that I would have from the widow
up there would have me feeling like I was king of the world rather than a roach
hiding in the woodwork of the corner of the kitchen. You’d think I’d welcome that change.
Nevertheless, in the midst of the transition things
are quite ambiguous and that makes us feel quite anxious. The feelings associated with the stages of
grief come up. We enter the deep river
of denial and isolation; feeling like we’re the only person to have ever gone
through this. We are perpetually angry
or at least grumpy all the time. We
start to dwell on a list of regrets and “if only I had done this or that” in a
futile effort to get what’s gone back.
We understandably feel sadness even to the point of depression. We can’t seem to get it in gear. But, in time the shock wears off and we feel
like maybe taking a kick at this new can.
All those feelings and stuff, that’s the transition that comes with
change and its why we naturally don’t want to go through change.
The Israelites are a good example of this. They were slaves in Egypt. Their workload was ever-increasing under
cruel taskmaster’s. They cried out. The
Lord God freed them and in the process humiliated Pharaoh, devastated his armies,
and showed the gods of Egypt to be impotent. Then, God veiled in a cloud personally and
powerfully led them to the Promised Land, the land of milk and honey, but they
still had to go through the Wilderness to get there. You’d think that they would have shouted
“Free at last. Free at last. Thank God we’re free at last.” and danced their
way to Canaan’s Land. But all the way they
were scared. They complained. They longed for Egypt and going back to the
security of being slaves and, yes, worshipping those impotent gods of Egypt. They didn’t trust they’re leaders or the
ability of their leaders. When they
arrived at the Promised Land they spied it out but were too afraid to enter it. There were giants in the Land. Eighty years and two generations later
finally they cross the Jordon.
The change was God’s delivering them from
slavery. The transition was what they
went through in the wilderness. The
change was a powerful work on God’s part, but powerful works alone do little to
build our faith and identity as God’s people.
The wilderness was where that happened.
Following the presence of the Lord in the cloud, listening to Moses, and
living under (pardon the phrase) austerity measures changed the Hebrew people
from being slaves. You can take the
people out of Egypt, but how do you take Egypt out of the people?…wandering in
the wilderness. They had to learn to
trust and follow the Lord without reserve because that’s the type of people
they needed to be to live in Canaan’s Land.
Otherwise, they’re just like the people of Canaan.
Looking more towards today, most churches today
resemble God’s people in slavery in Egypt. People who participate in a congregation such
as ours today are likely to fell like slaves to an institution. Fewer people means more work for fewer and
fewer able bodies. The financial burdens
of full-time clergy and aging facilities necessitate greater giving by fewer
and fewer people just to keep up.
Congregational self-esteem plummets.
Whole congregations get depressed.
There’s grumbling, complaining, and fighting due to real but unchecked
anxiety about the future of “my church home.”
So many churches see their only option to be the either/or of staying
open until someone pries the church key from Mr. Heston’s cold, dead hands or
closing. But, closing a church and
forcing a church family to go elsewhere isn’t at all like moving an office up
to an attic. Leaving a church, a group
of people, that you’ve been involved with for years to decades does not come
without a truly painful personal cost to one’s own faith. When people leave a church today they are
likely to not go anywhere else.
The Pharaoh that congregations face today is the
reality that the communities in which we are situated are not Christian
anymore. The people who live in our
neighbourhoods are secular, post-Christian, and “spiritual” (whatever that
means) and for the most part poised against participation in the institution of
the Church and that’s if they have any inkling at all of what Christian faith
is. Something called discontinuous
change has come to our land.
Sometimes change is simply an adaptation in order for
things to continue the way they always have.
This was the church from the 70’s to the early 90’s. Praise bands, PowerPoint presentations, a
sermon that sounds, feels, and looks like a self-improvement seminar that your
boss sent you to in order to increase productivity in the workplace - the
congregations who made those adaptations experienced institutional growth up
until about 15 years ago and the growth was mostly from church swappers rather
than new believers. These changes within
congregations were in-house adaptations to the change in media and technology
that everybody has grown accustomed to since the advent of television. But now, even the churches that made these
adaptations are beginning to struggle. Discontinuous
change has truly become pervasive. The
people in our surrounding communities are no longer simply back-slidden or latent
Christians who just need to find their way inside these doors.
I think James here can help us gain a vision of the
church, of our Promised Land, and its not a church that simply makes
adaptations in style, but is rather a community that participates in Jesus' own ministry of healing, prayer, and forgiveness. He sees the Church as a group
of people where things of status like wealth and prestige or being poor and
lacking privilege don’t define a person.
God does not discriminate against people when deciding whom to pour his
Spirit upon and adopt as his child. God wants
to heal us no matter who we are. The
congregation that persists through this wilderness of discontinuous change will
emerge as a community of healing in which God has poured his Spirit on everyone
of us not just the elders as he did in Moses’ day. This healing community is where people who
are suffering the burdens of the world are prayed for and they indeed find
relief from the presence of the Lord.
This healing community is where people come and share their weaknesses
and own up to their short-comings and the pain they’ve caused and rather than
judge them we pray for them so that they feel those burdens lifted up and born away
by Jesus. It’s a wonderful feeling of
deliverance, if you’ve ever felt that.
The soul-healing that Jesus has to give is akin to resurrection from the
dead. Indeed, it is the proof and
foretaste of resurrection from the dead.
What is even more amazing is that he uses our ears and our prayers in
the process of bringing this soul-healing about. The church that survives this discontinuous
change will be the healing community that happens over the backyard fence or
the cup of coffee in conversations where we love our neighbours, our actual
neighbours, enough to sincerely ask them how they are and listen to them,
really listen to them hearing the burdens they bear and praying for them rather
than judging them; expecting nothing in return from them but from Jesus,
expecting him to bring them soul-healing as he has done for us. Amen.
