Look, I am about to do something new; even now it is coming. Do you not see it? Indeed, I will make a way in the wilderness, rivers in the desert.
Isaiah 43:19 CSB
Wowza.. where has this year gone. I mean it has been the fastest year yet for me, but at the same time, the slowest and toughest year. I feel like I should be getting ready for summer, not winter, but also still getting ready for the holidays at the same time. Our experience of time is weird that way. It can be slow feeling like it is twice as long as it should be, or so fast you think you blacked out because hours had passed and you only started doing whatever you were doing.
It's pretty safe to say that human grasp on time is weak at best. On a side note, I always wondered if there was a way to "control time" in out brains. Like our perspective on how fast it is flowing. If there was there would be times that I would slow down because of the company I kept. Other times I would speed up so that I can get back to that other company. I always felt that time, even being linear, was always in a constant state of flux. Tides rising and falling and if we are aware enough we can ride along that tide and experience things in a different way.. but then again, I am writing on "The Dreamers' Door" I must be somewhat of a dreamer.
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| From Bible.com |
I know people often take a look back on past times. Something that is completely human. Though many animals remember the past humans have a special ability to dwell in the past all the while still moving forward in time. Some people never get over the loss of a loved one, stuck in a time that will never come again because a future without that person isn't a future they want to see. Some people are stuck in a past version of themselves when they feel they were at their prime and it can't possibly get better. And some churches are stuck in a time when the pews were full of children laughing, families singing old hymns and pastors filling the building with God and the American Dream.
I remember a time when my small country church had most of the pews filled. Honestly some of the best memories of church are still sitting by the middle window on the left side of the sanctuary. I felt like God was closer back then. Maybe he was. But it wasn't God who pulled away. I had a huge look at life and a long time ahead of me. I'm sure the churches thought the same. With pulpits full and money coming in every week, it's easy to not look too far ahead. It is easy to not even noticing how far we are getting from God. We are walking the same narrow path as God, yet we are so far away and it seems we are walking further away.
When times are good it's easy to sit back and relax. Our work has been good, let's enjoy the fruits now. It is a good time to dwell in the past of our success, forgetting about a future where hell is on the prowl. We get complacent and we drift from God. It is a dangerous thing, complacency.
Complacency will keep us from reaching bigger and better things. It keeps us from reaching more people and keeps our love simple and shallow. Complacency is the enemy of churches. But while churches are complacent, God is out there doing. While we might have a hard time seeing God, God has a very clear view of us. He is so close that we could never hide. So many smaller American churches are stuck where they are, dwelling in the past, complacent in where they are they forget God is not a God of having done. He does not dwell in the past, though he was present for all of it. He dwells in the now he dwells here. He's is a God of doing.
I know I have talked about this verse before, and I know many many other people have too. But it crept back into my reading just recently and I found I had more to share. Do you see the new that God has done this past year? Nothing to do with the virus or having to stay home, though I personally am glad being an introvert is finally paying off. No, look at Sunday. What is the new thing there. Something that a lot of churches had never even considered. We are now live streaming and sharing videos of our services online. It's new, and it's working.
For so long we have been fine with the way things were that we forgot to look at how things could be. The same old hymns, the same organ or piano, never daring to try something new until we are forced to. It is a rather natural thing to do for humans. I know I don't like to try new things very often. Well maybe never, but if we constantly stay where we are nothing will ever change.
Back in 2016 id Software came out with a game called Doom. A franchise game that has been rather synonymous with a whole genre of video games since 1993. It updated the game to better fit the modern first person shooters as well as the modern gameplay, while managing to keep what made the game so well received for nearly 3 decades. They looked forward to see what needed to be updated and embraced it. But who embraced it the most was the guy that wrote the music.
Mick Gordon is a composer who was tasked with the big job to write a soundtrack to the new game. In a talk about the music he talked about a "machine" that he created with various musical equipment in his studio. Running wires and passthroughs and whatever to get the sounds he was looking for he wrote a soundtrack that is instantly recognizable and perfectly fits the game. At its heart it feels exactly what music for Doom should be, yet felt modern and new.
He also mentioned a concept I found rather impactful, and I hope he meant it to. He talked about composers, that if you give a composer who is into electronic music, you will get electronic music back. Give a metal guy something to write he will write metal. That is not a bad thing, it is what we do, we almost always do what we are familiar with. It is safe and comfortable and complacent. But if you want a metal guy to write something different, then he has to do it all different.
How many times have you had an issue doing something and you just keep trying it the same way over and over again. We are, as they say, creatures of habit. But if you really want a different outcome, you have to change the process. "Change the process, change the outcome." There is no denying that the church process is one that hasn't changed drastically in many, many years. If you travel around the country, you can almost fit into any church out there. There are always greetings, announcements, hymns, praise songs, a sermon, prayers, collections, and standing up and sitting down. And I admit I am not sure how much of that can change with out changing the fundamentals of the Church. But over the last few decades, we have been slow to catch up and embrace new ways of doing stuff.
Serious question for you here. What is the newest song you sing fairly regular in Church? Through the pandemic and the aftermath, we have been forced to review how we do things and try and reach people with a whole new process that we have not done before. There have been many programs I have seen churches use, sometimes they work, most of the time they don't. In my opinion (which is redundant because the whole idea of a blog is that it is my opinion. but I digress.) Much of them fail because the process is never changed. It is the same people doing the same thing getting the same outcome.
As 2021 continues to march inevitably toward 2022 and it seems pretty clear that we aren't going back to how things were before, and maybe this is for the better. Our process has been forcibly changed and we many churches have met this change head on. We are now beginning to reach people, old and new, in ways we wouldn't have thought of five years ago. (Well some of us might not have thought of it. I did, I wanted to try and get a group of people in World of Warcraft to meet up and do a bible study in the game near 10 years ago. Guess I might be ahead of the times. ;) ) I pray that we all keep this forward momentum going and learn from this. I pray that we keep changing the process so that we can get newer and better outcomes and reach every person we can sharing the love that Christ has come to give to everyone.
