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.

Everything Changes... Almost

QWERTY. That is a word that you will find in some dictionaries, but not with the definition that should be there. It should say "something that is outdated, outmoded, and holds us back for no sensible reason." Instead, the definition given is "a standard typewriter or computer keyboard."

I just finished Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond, which I will write more on later, but he has this to say about the keyboard:

"This book, like probably every other typed document you have ever read, was typed with a QWERTY keyboard, named for the left-most six letters in its upper row. Unbelievable as it may sound now, that keyboard layout was designed in 1873 as a feat of anti-engineering. It employs a whole series of perverse tricks designed to force typists to type as slowly as possible, such as scattering the commonest letters over all the keyboard rows and concentrating them on the left side (where right-handed people have to use their weaker hand). The reason behind all of those seemingly counterproductive features is that the typewriters of 1873 jammed if adjacent keys were struck in quick succession, so that manufacturers had to slow down typists. When improvements in typewriters eliminated the problem of jamming, trails in 1932 with an efficiently laid-out keyboard showed that it would let us double our typing speed and reduce our typing effort by 95 percent. But QWERTY keyboards were solidly entrenched by then. The vested interests of thousands of QWERTY typists, typing teachers, typewriter and computer salespeople, and manufacturers have crushed all moves toward keyboard efficiency for over 60-years." (page 248, emphasis mine)

I knew about needing to layout the keyboard the way it was in order to keep the typewriter from jamming, but I did not know how long ago it was done. I also did not know that changes to allow us to type faster, more efficiently and with less energy expended were recommended as long ago as they were either. The long and short of this that we are using a keyboard that is obsolete and that should have been replaced a long time ago simply because people are too accustomed to it and don't want to make a change. Is that reasonable?

What if the same thing was true of cars (the first model A was sold on this date in 1903), planes, television or even card catalogs, and no improvements were allowed simply because everyone was comfortable with what already existed and didn't want anything new? Now I loved looking in card catalogs because I often found things that I wouldn't have otherwise found, but the same is true to a much greater extent searching for things on-line. So why are we continuing to use this keyboard? (The same might also be said for changing to metric.)

This leads me back to my earlier post, and asking the question, what in the church are we holding onto even though it is obsolete? Do you know why most worship services are held when they are? Because farmers needed time to milk the cows and do other chores around the farm before they could get to church. So worship couldn't be at 8 or even some places at 9, because that would not give them enough time. There are all sorts of these things in which the purpose and necessity have long since passed, but we can't change because change is scary, no one wants to do it differently or learn something different, and after all, "that's the way we've always done it." Those are the seven most deadly words.

Everything Changes

Here is a list of the top ten companies in the Fortune 500 for three selected years:
Since 1955, there have been 2000 companies on the list. As you see, only two companies are found on all three lists and the list from 1955 represents a very different world. Certainly some of those companies from 1955 are still in existence, but if you look at what the companies in 1955 did and compare them to what the companies in 2010 do you see a distinct difference. Microsoft, Dell and Walmart were not even included anywhere on the list in 1990.

Even GE, which still does "electronics", does so in a very different way. They have changed who they are and what they do in order to stay competitive and to move into a new future. The oil companies still have a large presence, but my prediction is that if they do not make significant changes to their primary product that in twenty years they will not be on this list anymore. Companies must adapt and change in order to survive.

This list is about the mainline church as much as it is about the companies. We have to change if we want to survive. But this is not about survival for survival sake, because that just makes us another company. Instead we need to change because we have a message to offer the world, and we need make sure that people can hear and receive that message. "I am all things to all people," Paul said.

In going out beyond Jerusalem, Paul found that he had to change what was important. Would the church exist today if all those who pushed for following Jewish law had won? Fortunately we will never know because Paul's argument won the day, and the traditions that he considered unimportant to the message and stood in the way of people receiving the gospel message were eliminated. We must do the same.

The high point of mainline churches, of which the United Methodist Church is one, in terms of power and membership was 1954. How many of our practices are based more on 1954 than 2010? How much of what we do is based on a reality and a world that simply does not exist anymore? Certainly there are core things that we need to hold onto, GE is not making donuts after all, but there are lots of other things that we hold as being important that aren't and that are holding us back.

We need to take a serious hard look at who we are and what we consider important and decide if it's central to what it means to be a Christian or if its important only because that is what we have always known. I am a church historian, but I don't want to be a part of a church that exists in the past, I want to be a part of a church that is happening right now and blazing a path for Christ into the future. Are we Esmark or are we GE?