Change

It seems hard to believe, but the summer is nearly over. Some schools have already opened and the rest will resume next week. Our kids have all moved up a grade, and we adults have progressed another year as well.

Pastor Joel returns this week from his well deserved three-month sabbatical during which he spent part of his time studying worship trends throughout the country. The staff will be meeting with him later in the week to bring him up-to-date on what happened here over the past three months, and for him to bring us up-to-date on what he discovered.

Pastor Joel decided to focus on worship during his sabbatical because it was the only area of the five identified by our strategic planning process three years ago that hasn’t really made any progress (the other four areas are conflict management, youth in crisis, adult education, and local outreach). And so Pastor Joel was hoping that in taking on this work, we as a congregation might make be able to look at this topic together. He will be making a presentation to the various commissions who handle these issues and to the rest of the congregation later in the fall.

I know this has caused anxiety on the part of some, and they have wondered what, if anything, will be changed. As pastors we are well aware that many of the things we do in the church are so called “third rails” and we touch them at our own peril. But we also realize that sometimes, in order to grow individually and collectively, change is necessary.

I have been doing some reading lately on traditions and rituals for both everyday events and for significant transitions. Sometimes traditions and rituals run their course and they are no longer as effective as they once were. I’m sure that if you have children then you have had a ritual for putting them to bed, but that ritual has changed over time. Linda and I cannot put Samantha or Abigail to bed now the way we did when they were infants, nor will we be able to put them to bed in a few years the way we are doing it now. Rituals, and even traditions, change as people change. That is one of the rules of life.

Sometimes people want to hold on to things simply because “that’s the way it’s always been done.” In the Protestant tradition we do not hold that tradition is an important enough reason to keep something in place if it is no longer theologically necessary. Sometimes that means we remove it, other times we come up with new theological reasons for doing the same thing, and sometimes we create new rituals and traditions.

I don’t know what changes will be adopted by this congregation, but I do ask that as they are presented that we all keep an open mind and if you have a negative reaction ask yourself why you are feeling that way. Is it just a reaction to change, with which all of us struggle, or is there something deeper?

There is nothing in the church that wasn’t new at some point, and our traditions and rituals vary from denomination to denomination, and even from church to church. When I moved to New England I had to learn a new way of being Methodist. Even though it doesn’t always seem like it, the simple fact is the church is always changing because God is always calling us to do new things and to reach new people. So together let us pray for God’s guidance to give us the answers and to move us in the direction that God needs and wants us to go.