The Main Line Church and its Uneasy Relationship to Change
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By Tom Ehrich
Religion News Service
NEW YORK (RNS) As I watched ABC's "helicam" pan along the main straightaway at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway on my television, I could see my seats in the Paddock, across from the pits, and wished I were there.
Sure, you see more on television, but nothing matches the intensity and drama of being in the stands with 275,000 rapt fans as 33 Honda engines roar to life and low-slung racing machines turn laps of 221 mph.
Alas, this wasn't the year to use my four seats. With my youngest son's high school graduation and oldest son's wedding both happening in two weeks, I am tapped out for time, energy and travel funds. Hopefully next year.
Or maybe not. Things change, you know. If I have learned nothing else as a lifelong fan of the Indianapolis 500, everything changes. Race fans were aghast when four-cylinder front-mounted engines were replaced by six- and eight-cylinder rear-mounted engines. But the cars went faster and held the track better.
Every year brings more innovations. Some fail and are abandoned. Some succeed and become part of the lore.
If only other institutions were this flexible and willing to try new ways. But people fight hard to stop change. Even when sales tank, pews empty, audiences evaporate and self-defeating behaviors drag us down, we continue in the delusion that change is a choice and, if we feel like it, can be stopped.
Change happens. Sometimes for the better, sometimes not. Change happens because life is dynamic, the human spirit restless, our minds inventive, our yearnings and empty places never quite filled, and we are surrounded by forces we cannot control.
As a lifelong mainline Christian, I have seen the stop-change delusion up close. In one generation, we went from full pews to half-empty pews, because we couldn't deal with change. We wore ourselves out fighting over internal changes that didn't matter. Meanwhile, the world we should have been serving was changing, and we chose not to adapt.
Instead of sticking to our self-defined plans and protecting our facilities and traditions, we should have done what Jesus did when he saw death undo the life of a widow. He stopped his journey and stepped into the need. He had compassion and gave away his own safety.
His self-sacrificial gift enabled a young man to live. Our self-serving preservation of tradition and inheritance, by contrast, has brought mainline Christianity to its knees, to the verge of bankruptcy. It is tragic, and it is wasteful.
Yet I sense a better day. As I work with churches, I sense a new spirit of compassion, a fresh and risky willingness to experience the world's pain. I hear less interest in fussing about changes that don't matter and more desire to see the lonely and broken, even if that means seeing our own loneliness and brokenness.
I see a new solidarity with the unjustly treated and less noblesse oblige. I see real engagement with need and not symbolic gestures. I hear preachers moving beyond eloquence and style and wanting simply to connect, even if connecting exposes them to being known as human.
It's not about guilt or good intentions or better planning. The key is compassion, the sharing of pathos. Compassion changes everything, opening doors we can't easily close again.
(Tom Ehrich is a writer, church consultant and Episcopal priest based in New York. He is the author of "Just Wondering, Jesus," and the founder of the Church Wellness Project, http://www.churchwellness.com. His Web site is http://www.morningwalkmedia.com.)
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First Posted: 06/01/10 09:48 PM ET Updated: 05/25/11 05:40 PM ET