Image: Francesco Marino / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Recently I read what Scott Williams wrote about change. He wrote that change is good. More specifically, he discussed change as it relates to sports teams. This got me thinking. (Insert sarcastic remark).
Most of us have a favorite sports team or two – whether it’s in baseball, football, basketball, or hockey. It may be a professional team, a college program, or a semi-pro league member.
For me, as I have written before, I grew up following the Atlanta Braves. I have other (more local) favorites too, like the Tampa Bay Rays and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Regardless of the team, though, there are times in the life of the team when we, as fans, believe something needs to change. Sometimes we want to see the team get rid of one player or try to acquire another player. Sometimes we think the coach or manager needs to be changed. Whatever change we feel is necessary, we always deem the change is good and for the good of the team as a whole.
Generally, these proposed and desired changes come at times when things just aren’t going as well as we the fans had hoped and we call for changes to be made in order to make the situation and the team better.
The thought I had about all this is: Why aren’t we more like that when it comes to our Sunday School class, our outreach strategy, or our church as a whole? What do you think?
Because it is the very nature of a church to be hostile to change. In all churches there has always been extremely little change, and it has always been violently opposed where it could no longer be ignored or supressed.
The very essence of a church is defined by their doctrine, so it cannot be easily revised, neither for better nor for worse. This becomes obvious with regard to the core tennets, but also holds true for smaller, seemingly irrelevant things. For example: A lot of protestant churches in europe now view the whole bible as merely metaphoric, and do not even belief in a historlical Jesus anymore. Can you still call yourself a christian without a belief in christ? So the protestand churches, after all that reforming, are now merely a fuzzily superstitious bunch of rather ignorant humanists, not knowing what they really believe, other than roughly adopted values of the enlightenment with a belief in some sort of “god”, by which they of course mean not a god anymore, but rather a “higher power” of some sort or a general “life force”.
The catholic church on the other hand has a much more consistent position, but also one more medieval. The same sentiment that protected them from reformation of their core tennets also protected them from advancing their views on stem-cells or use of contraceptives, or even their misogyny.
Once a faith allows even the slightest change to it’s doctrine, they tread on a slipperey slope that also endangers the core tennets of the faith. If the pope admits to a mistake in a matter however little, he implicitly allows for the possibility of him being wrong on other, maybe more important things, too.
Change IS a good thing, but it is also dangerous. When something is improved it triggers people to look for other things that might need improvement also, and often it turns our that there is very little that doesn’t. To a congregation that defines its very identity through dogma, this is potentially lethal.
“Change IS a good thing, but it is also dangerous.” You are right. However, when thinking about change, we should always view from the perspective of changing our methods, not the message. Thanks for reading and commenting!