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Adventures in Transition, Part 2

As I wrote previously, our faith family is in a time of major transition. It is both an exciting and scary adventure. It is also very insightful and as we move from one phase of this transition to another I feel like we have grown both individually and collectively. Just like an individual, a faith family should never stop growing or become stagnant. Change itself is uncomfortable and not something we will all voluntarily choose. I also don’t think that most of us voluntarily choose to settle into a rut. It is something that just happens over time. Things that you might have thought more about at one time become common, habitual and once in a while it is good to have things shaken up a little bit. While change isn’t comfortable, if we respond to it in the right way it can lead to healthy growth. And pardon me as rant for a moment, by growth I DO NOT mean people filling seats, which is probably the most common way to measure the growth of a church. What I have seen in our family is growth in spiritual maturity, in relationships, and in serving others. I’d much rather have this kind of growth than be part of a faith family that is big in attendance but shallow when it comes to the essentials of spiritual life. Rant over. 😉
Here are a few of the gems that I’ve observed in our faith family:

1.) A healthy faith family prays, lots. They pray both together and individually.  One of the best results of this transition for us is a campaign called “Take Fifteen” that encourages every person to commit 15 minutes each day to praying for our body. It’s an easy commitment and we were even given specific prayer requests so it was not hard to fill that time. I hope this continues even after this transition. Prayer is powerful! This isn’t rocket science but is always a good reminder.

2.) A healthy faith family communicates properly. Gossip can do terrible, terrible damage more quickly than I think most realize. When a complaint or rumor has come up rather than spread it to neighbors and close friends the party concerned has been encouraged to take these concerns directly to the leadership or individuals involved. It has meant a LOT of meetings but it has also meant a lot of misunderstandings cleared up and further hurt avoided. Again, not a novel idea but it’s so easy to fall into gossip if we aren’t careful.

3.) A healthy faith family is quick to forgive. As I mentioned in my last post people respond to change in different ways. This is bound to cause misunderstand and assumptions to be made. As people are learning to communicate properly they are also learning to be quick to forgive and quick to ask for forgiveness. This has been one of my favorite things to observe.

4.) A healthy faith family respects other points of views. In any group with more than, well, one person you are bound to have disagreements and conflicting points of view. When it comes to the non-deal breaking theological issues we have seen many views expressed in our faith family. I have appreciated the way that we as a group have respected each other. While we might not all agree, we still love and respect each other and really, we will not know the answers to some of these questions until we can ask God directly so why cause strife in a relationship about it?

5.) A healthy faith family encourages each individual to use their gifts to bless the whole. We all have different talents. Not all of us can play the guitar, preach a sermon, say an eloquent prayer, or lead a bible study. However cleaning the upstairs bathrooms, coordinating the speaking schedule, and keeping the driveway from icing over are all just as important and it has been wonderful to see so many step up and say, “I can help out by doing that.”

6.) A healthy faith family remembers who its true leader is. At the end of this transition we will have some new leadership but really, our true leader has never changed and this whole process has been such a good reminder of that. No one individual makes up the whole faith family or should ever be the face of it. We are all members with Christ as our head and he never changes.

Posted on by thezyps · 1 Comment

Adventures in Transition, Part 1

A mentor and very wise woman I know has this phrase as her email signature line:

“From a distance it looks like an adventure … up close it is filled with challenges”

I think she may have even been the one who originally said it. Did I mention that she is very wise (and also doing some awesome things in the country of Uganda)? Anyway, I’ve thought of this saying often in the last three months as our faith family experiences some very big transitions. Typically I think that transition is fun and exciting, especially  when I am anticipating it. However when it’s out of the blue, forced upon me, it’s another story. This transition in our faith family was big and nothing short of a shock that left many people feeling hurt, abandoned and confused. To be honest I am very excited about where this will lead our community. I am excited about  the many opportunities to grow and experience a level of freedom we’ve not know for a very long time. From a distance it looks like a fun adventure….

…but up close, in the day to day interactions, it is filled with challenges. Relationships are messy and church is weird. It doesn’t function quite like a business or workplace nor does is it fully function as a family. Navigating the ins and outs of daily church decisions and relationships can be tricky. I’m sure this is true any time but it is magnified when there is a transition.

I am learning and seeing that people respond to change in different ways. Some people embrace the change and use it as a impetus to change lots of areas. They tend to think, since A is changing we might as well make changes to B and C as well. They may even change things not because they need to be changed but simply because they can be changed.  In this way they can create a feeling of security or control in an insecure time. Other people respond in pretty much the completely opposite way. Feeling shaken up by the changes they have experienced can lead them to cling tightly to all that is familiar.  Any new changes, even small ones, feel huge and uncomfortable. They resist change because the last change was hard and uncomfortable. They tend to think, why would we want to change anything else right now? By holding tight to everything that remains familiar they can create a feeling of security or control in an insecure time.

Now take all these people, who really both have the same end goal of feeling secure, and encourage them to be an active participant in this faith family. Ask them to contribute and use their gifts and insights, tell them to “get off the bench and into the game” and imagine what happens. Challenges. Lots of them.

Challenges are not bad. They are great opportunities to grow and learn. What is bad is when people in the first group see the people in the second group as sticks in the mud that they can’t work with. Or when people in the second group see the actions of those in the first group as reckless and disrespectful. What we need to see, what I’m trying desperate to remember during this time, is that we need each other. We balance each other out and together make a fuller, more accurate representation of Christ than we could ever do alone. Isn’t that our goal in the end, to look more like Christ?

So perhaps up close all we can see is a bunch of messy brush strokes that seem too dull and too conservative or too bright and just too much but hopefully from a distance we really are a beautiful and slightly unfocused image of Christ.