There’s an old hymn that starts with the words, “Through all the changing scenes of life…”. It’s a good hymn, and those words sum up for me something of the essence of life – change. Everything changes, moment by moment, day by day, year by year. And it happens whether we like it or not. Like the change from summer to autumn, it’s just the way things are. We get older, people we know change, or move on; we change jobs, we retire, we have children or our children grow up and leave home. Change is all around us and it is constant. And yet, how many of us expect the church to stand still and never change? How many times is the remark ‘but we’ve always done it that way’ used as if it’s the last word, the one argument that cannot be countered?
Of course, the church is in a strange and unique position. In a sense the church shouldn’t change. It shouldn’t change in what it stands for, what it believes. It shouldn’t change because God does not change and Christ does not change. He is, as Hebrews puts it, the same, yesterday, today and forever. The church stands for eternal, unchanging principles like truth, faith, love and peace. It cannot and must not blow with the wind, defining right and wrong by whatever happens to be fashionable in the media this year. There is a difference between right and wrong, between truth and falsehood, between good and evil.
But the fact the church is supposed to stand firm for God’s truth does not mean it can afford to stand still and never change how it does things, in how it communicates those truths in relevant ways. Sometimes we do need to change how we do things.
Now, a lot of people hate change. It makes them feel uncomfortable. It makes something that was easy into something that feels different and scary. I know what that’s like, because my first reaction to change is exactly like that. I know a new shirt doesn’t feel comfortable at first, and I’d rather keep using the old one. Yet at some point, the old one is just not up to the job and has to go in the bin. If we are committed to serving God, then sometimes that means doing things that make us uncomfortable at first. We’ll get used to them in time, and even forget they once were new.
Imagine how different the Bible’s story would have run had Abraham simply refused to give up the familiar, easy life he had in Ur, when God told the then 80-year old Abram to get up and leave everything he knew and go into the unknown like a travelling Bedouin. Imagine if Moses refused to go back to Egypt when God told him to do that. Imagine if Jesus had turned his back on the ministry the Father called him to, because he preferred the quiet life as a carpenter in Nazareth!
Sometimes, we have to do difficult things. Things we’d just rather not. Sometimes that’s the only way God’s will can be accomplished. I feel very much that we are at a crossroads as a church. Perhaps we are every year when things start up after the summer break. Are we going to carry on just as we have for the past five, ten or twenty years? Or is God calling us to something new? I don’t know what that might be for you. I wonder what it might be for me. Let’s listen for God’s voice, and do what he tells us. It might just surprise us, like it must have shocked Abraham and Moses in their day, just how much God can then accomplish through us.
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