Evolving Church...Into What Exactly?
About 17 years ago then Moderator Peter Short called for a gathering of leaders within the United Church to discuss the future of the denomination. Like a lot of other such discussions I don’t remember anything concrete actually coming out of that event. I do remember writing a letter placing my name in nomination for attending (I was not selected).
In his call for the Arnprior event Short commented on the fact that the United Church was 80. Apparently some people count 40 years to be a generation and so, Short said, the United Church of Canada was entering its 3rd generation. This resonated with me at the time, as I could clearly count myself as part of that third generation. My paternal grandmother had been, I found out at her funeral, a Presbytery Secretary in the 1950’s. My own parents had been very active in local church governance/leadership for my entire life. And I of course had gone into Ordained Ministry. But that is not really the point I was making.
The point I found when I looked at these three generations of leadership was that the church into which I was ordained was already very different than the church when my parents were on local council in the 1970’s and 80’s. That church itself was markedly different from the church when my grandmother was a Presbytery Secretary. Even then the United Church was a very different thing than it had been when my grandparents became United as children, when the Presbyterian Church in Simpson voted to become part of Union. 17 years later the church is again a different place than it was when I wrote that letter.
The church has always been evolving and changing. Even when we don’t notice. Even when we wish it would stay the same. Even when we pretend the change is not happening. Even when we try to stop it from happening. The church is always changing, largely because the people in the church and the world around the church is always changing.
Over the last 10-15 years I have seen a number of articles about what happens when organizations are not nimble enough to evolve as the world around them changes. Generally they don’t do so well. A classic example is KODAK, which remained stuck in the film era as cameras quickly became digital – where are they now? However mere survival is not why I think the church needs to keep evolving. In fact if survival is our main goal I suggest we are missing the point of being a faith community.
In the church we keep evolving, we keep reforming, because we are striving to follow where God is leading. The more we interact with the world, and with the tradition, and listen for God’s voice the more we are changed. The question that needs to guide our evolution is less “how can we be more relevant or worldly” and more “how is God calling us to be in the world today”.
So the question is never “should the church change?”. The questions we need to ask are “How is the church changing?” and “How should the church be changing?”. If the church did not evolve we would still not be ordaining women, or re-marrying divorced people, or recognizing the reality of racism, or working for LGBTQ+ inclusion. If the church did not listen for God’s wisdom (which I believe is revealed in a variety of places and ways) we would remain stuck in old ways of thinking and miss out the signs that God is at work around us. We would lose the chance to be a part of what God is about in the world.
The church can choose to resist. The church could choose to be the same as it once was. But then God will find another way. God leads us to evolve and change and grow so that we can take part in what God is up to – creating the Kin-dom of God. Sometimes we will get it wrong and try to evolve in the wrong direction. Sometimes we will run into a dead end and have to re-group. But we have to keep being open to change and evolution. May God give us the wisdom, the courage, and the hope to keep evolving as the gathered children of God.
And who really knows where we will end up, what we will look like, who we will be? Maybe God has some big surprise waiting for us!
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