Tag: imagination

We’d rather kill things than learn about them.

© Michael Friedman, some rights reserved (CC-BY-NC)

I started my sermon this Sunday with a bit of a joke, as one of our texts was from Numbers 21 (God sending snakes to bite and kill the people of Israel & then later providing a bronze snake to save them). As a newcomer to living in a place where there are venomous snakes, my family has found numerous people willing to share scary stories about snake bites or snake encounters. But after service one of my congregation members, a local biologist, came up to me with the following profound statement, “So often we would rather kill things than simply to learn more about them and how to keep each other safe.”

This got me thinking about some of our most natural responses to situations that we find ourselves in that we haven’t experienced before. Where is it that we learn to fear snakes & their bites and do everything within our power to rid our surroundings of them, including trying to kill them ourselves (one of the leading causes of snakebites in humans)? Why is it that so often one of our first responses to these situations are fight or flight models, kill the snake or run away, instead of learning more about how to live together?

And I know, you’re wondering what this all has to do with the church and church leadership. But so often our own reactions to change around us is the same reactions we have to encountering a snake. For the church we’ve seen it in worship wars, as congregations fight over times for worship as congregations as they move from 2 service times to 1, music styles of traditional and contemporary, liturgical orders from traditional sources or more free flowing. So often, our reaction to these changes (or lack of change) leads to our fight of flight instincts kicking in & we try to kill off that which isn’t familiar to us.

I’ve now served in multiple locations across the United States and each of these different locations have their “evil megachurch that’s stealing all the members away” in their midst. These large churches, with their large budgets, attract members away from many mainline congregations and get a negative reputation. But when asked what they’re doing that’s taking everyone away, the answer more often than not that they’re doing worship or education (adult, youth, and children) very well, something they’re not finding in the churches they leave.

Instead of learning about the ways that this focus is succeeding, investing in the areas of our own ministries that struggle, and meeting the needs of our congregations that are causing members to leave, we instead vilify, and in many ways kill off, those who have left & are quick to judge them as evil and ourselves as that which needs to live.

Where are those places where we need to lean in & learn more about what is happening in our midst in order to address the challenges we face? What are places that we’ve missed the opportunity to learn about our neighbors by cutting them off or vilifying them instead of meeting them? How can our story of faith change if we spent more time learning and less time killing those things that are different, challenging, or hurtful for us?

New Beginnings in a New Reality.

It’s incredible to imagine that 4 years ago today most of the United States began their shut down due to the Covid-19 pandemic outbreak. As a sports fan I remember Rudy Goebert testing positive just a day after making a joke of touching the microphones of reporters. Then within days we were into a new reality, quarantine, hand washing, a new term “social distancing”, and everything else that came with this new reality of having Covid within our midsts.

For churches this meant new realities for us as well. We learned how to stream our worship services, so that congregation members could still experience the sacred rituals even if they weren’t able to safely attend in person. We wondered about what Christian community looked like as we tried to support each other, through phone calls, delivering groceries, mailing cards, or taping hearts to our house windows. The beginning of the pandemic created a new reality for all of us, on that we imagined would probably only last a few weeks or months. Little did we know…

As I reflect back on those new realities that were cast upon us as a society in those early days and weeks, I’m struck by how many of those realities still remain in this new reality that we’re living in today.

Our churches face new realities today, some that haven’t been experienced as a church for many generations. We now face a world in which those who choose the option of attending religious services are in the vast minority (70% of the US claims Christianity, but less than 36% attend church weekly). Church pews are emptier than they have been in a long time. Church buildings are facing closures.

We continue to ask questions about what a “hybrid” church looks like. Does online membership “count” to the work of what the church is doing? Can we do ministry with people who we may have never met in person? Does the model of “consuming church” (like so many of us shifted to early in the pandemic) count for real church ministry? Or do we need to gather in order to make it more authentic?

These questions are hard. But they’re not going away. And many of the early technical answers that we provided early in the pandemic are now needing adaptive answers in our cultures and our communities.

As we face these new realities we’re challenged with new problems and we must face them with a new imagination. I pray you join me for this journey as we explore together the ways in which God is calling us to imagine a new church in this new age.