“To stop changing is to die.”
That’s a really hard thought to process. It stings a little too. But I think intuitively we all know that it’s true. If we stop changing, then we will die.
“If Christianity is to remain ‘vital,’ then it is, in the truest sense, ‘vital’ that we understand change: for an organism to show signs of life, it must show it can respond to its environment, and for the church to retain a vibrancy about its faith, it must ‘adapt and survive.’”
The majority of churches right now are on this edge of trying to figure out the future. Which is no easy task. It’s huge, in fact. It’s daunting. We know the church is in a really hard spot, not just our individual congregation, but the church in general.
People don’t really like us. And that’s if they even deem to think about us at all.
The church is facing an irrelevancy problem. We aren’t relevant to the greater world anymore. We aren’t the go-to. Most people in the United States don’t go to church, most people don’t claim to even belong to a religion.
We’re going to be spending the next few years really discussing the future of our congregation. We’re going to open our minds to all the possibilities out there. It’s going to be hard to have these conversations, it’s going to cause conflict, it’s going to upset us all in different ways at different times.
But if there is one thing that we know to be true at this point, it’s that to keep going on the path we’re on, in the same way we’ve always done it, our congregation will fold. We will cease to exist. And the ministry that we are currently doing will no longer be.
We need to remember that while these conversations and discussions are hard, they will be worth it. God is with us. God will be with us.
And to stop changing is to die.