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To be honest, 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. I like my chair, my room, my bed, my routine, what I eat, being lazy, what I watch. Don’t change my it. My it don’t change. Can anybody relate? Do I hear an “Amen”?
But, you know, change, 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 ourselves and in our identity, and start doing things a different way, and at some point, eventually accept a new it.
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 can be perpetually angry or at least grumpy all the time. Or, we can start to dwell on the past, constructing a list of regrets, of “if only I had done this or not said that” in a futile effort to get back what’s gone. 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. God heard them and with a mighty hand freed them. In the process God 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…, no, that wasn’t the case.
In the transitional days of the Wilderness they were scared. They complained…a lot, the food’s terrible and where’s the water. They pined for Egypt where there were cucumbers and leeks, where they had the security of being slaves. Slavery may have really sucked but at least they could count on it. And, yes, returning to Egypt would have meant returning to the protection of those impotent gods of Egypt and worshipping them. They didn’t trust they’re leaders or their ability to lead. Then when they arrived at the Promised Land and they spied it out, they were too afraid to enter it. There were giants in the Land. Only two of the spies, Joshua and Caleb, were bold enough to say, “To God be the glory, we got this.” It all boiled down to the cold, hard fact that the Israelites just didn’t trust God to settle them in the new Land, the God who had parted the Red Sea and drowned Pharaoh’s army, who had led them and fed them all the way through the Wilderness. So, God made them wander in the Wilderness some more so as to learn faith. Forty years and a generation later, the people of Israel finally crossed the Jordan. The only two people of the first generation to settle in the Promised were Joshua and Caleb, even Moses didn’t make it.
The “Change” was God’s delivering them from slavery in Egypt to go live in the Land God had promised to their ancestors. The “Transition” was what they went through in the Wilderness to get there. The “Change” was a powerful work of deliverance by God’s hand, but powerful works alone do little to build our faith and identity as God’s people. The “Transition” they experienced in the Wilderness was where Faith happened – loyalty and devotion to God. Following the presence of the Lord in the cloud, listening to Moses, and living under (and pardon the phrase) austerity measures changed the Hebrew people from being slaves to Pharaoh into the beloved people of God. You see, 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 reservation because that’s the type of people they needed to be to live in Canaan’s Land where they were not welcome and where they faced the threat of becoming 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 feel like slaves to an institution. Having 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 making proactive decisions around closing or amalgamating. But, closing a church and forcing a church family to go elsewhere isn’t at all like moving from the recliner to a table to eat my dinner. Leaving a church building that you’ve called “home” and/or a group of people that have been friends who are family for years to decades does not come without a truly painful personal cost to one’s own faith. When people leave a church today, no matter the reason, they are likely to not go anywhere else. Do a survey of retired clergy and see how many of them still go to church…that’s if they can retire.
Something called discontinuous change has come to our land. Congregations today face the harsh reality that the communities in which we are situated are not Christian anymore while we, the Church, have existed in our culture as part of the culture bedrock. The people in our neighbourhoods are secular and post-Christian often with a bad taste in their mouths. Some may claim to be “spiritual” and whatever “spiritual” may mean to them, it’s private and don’t go there unless you’ve gained a lot of trust first. They are definitely poised against participation in the institution of the Church and that’s if they have any inkling at all of what Christian faith is. The media tends to make a mockery of the Christian faith and in some cases that is deserved. Something called discontinuous change is upon us.
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 20-25 years ago but 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. The Discontinuous Change brought upon us by our surrounding culture 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 we need a truer understanding of what the church is in order to exist in this Wilderness of discontinuous change. We can no longer simply strive to make adaptations in style. There is nothing we can do technologically or stylistically to compete with what the handheld smart device, social media, and a culture-wide addiction to revenge have done to our culture over the last 20 years. What we must be is a compassionate fellowship of friends who are family who participate in Jesus’ own ministry of healing, prayer, and forgiveness. We must be a fellowship where things of status like wealth, ethnicity, race, and prestige don’t define a person. God does not discriminate against people when deciding whom to pour his Spirit upon so as to adopt as his own beloved child, and that’s everyone. God is indiscriminate in whom he wants to heal.
The compassionate fellowship in Jesus that persists through this wilderness of discontinuous change will emerge as a community of healing in which God has poured his Spirit on each and every one of us not just the elders as he did in Moses’ day. This healing fellowship is where people who are suffering the burdens of the world are prayed for and they indeed find relief in the presence of the Lord. This fellowship of forgiveness 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 compassionate, healing, forgiving fellowship 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.
