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Pastor's Message
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The Changeless Nature of Change Happy New Year! From our family to the family of Grace, thank you for making our first year at Grace such a special one. We feel very blessed to be here. The turn of the year is a natural time for individuals and organizations to focus on the future. People make New Year’s resolutions and goals. Companies reevaluate their vision, direction, and practices. January 1st offers a unique perspective on our lives, relatively uninhibited by the year behind and predominantly colored by a fresh vision of the year ahead. For a brief moment in time, our focus shifts with mixed-emotions to the changes that could be in front of us. If you’re like me, you don’t need the excuse of New Year’s to engage the topic of change. I love talking about change. Exploring and discovering the would be’s, could be’s, and should be’s in any context or situation gets my juices flowing like very little else in this world. Like most people, I’m not interested in change only for change’s sake. But I do tend to be somewhat haunted by the notion that status quo—“doing the same-o, same-o”—is the precursor to ineffectiveness, decline and ultimately, death. As one of my early pastoral mentors expressed and lived out well into his 80s, which is when I met him: “If I’m not learning, growing, and changing…I’m dying.” (As I write this, Pastor Virgil Bjerke is battling life-threatening pneumonia at a hospital in California. And I would bet my life that he is trying to learn and adapt to something new: about hospitals, about how to say goodbye, about how the church needs to change to be more effective today. I am deeply thankful for his example and influence in my life.) God’s Word has irreversibly shaped my perspective on change. Here’s a patchwork sampling woven together by a common compelling theme: If anyone is in Christ, the old is gone and the new has come. Be transformed by the renewing of your minds. Pour new wine into new wineskins. See, I am doing something new! Oh, I love talking about change. That is, until it creeps into my own comfortable, safe little life… Three months ago, my wife encouraged me to try a new jogging route that she’d recently discovered. Now, you need to understand: Since we moved to Washington ten months ago I have been following the same route with little-to-no deviation every time I go for a run. I know exactly where I’m going, how long it’s going to take, what each street sign says…you get the picture. I was far too comfortable with my jogging routine to realize that it was getting tedious and stale—until I tried the new route! Although I still included a segment from my old route just in case, I ran with more energy and determination that day than I had in a long time. (Or at least in the last three months. Our spouses do know us well, don’t they?) Here’s the kicker with change: Change is going to happen with or without us. As one of our many incredible leadership human resources at Grace put it in a recent e-mail exchange: “Change happens, and it always will. To resist change is to deny the realities of the world we face every day…” And if we don’t change our running routes, then running the same old routes will subtly and invariably change us. One important and truthful perspective on change that I’ve heard around Grace recently: “We need to make sure we’re not making too many changes at once.” And then an equally valid response: “Really? I feel like we’re barely scratching the surface of change!” Our perspectives (mine included) on change are helplessly relative, intimately tied to our personalities, biases, and past experiences. That said, my admittedly haunted perspective on change and the status quo leads me to wonder: “Too many changes relative to what?” · To how much change has or hasn’t taken place at Grace over the years? · To the rapid decline of the mainline denomi- national church, of which Grace is part? (Statistical trends project the ELCA’s national membership to drop drastically from four mil- lion to one million in the next twenty years!) · To the light-speed pace of change in our cul- ture today and the changing methodology that will be required to reach the “next generation of Grace” that is currently fully immersed in our culture? · To the growing number of people and families living without Christ and his church? · To what’s uncomfortable and risky?” (Ok, can you identify my biases?) As much as we love or hate to talk about change, our relative opinions on change are exactly that. We can debate and analyze the nature of change until we’re blue in the face. Or until it passes us by. Or we blow right past it. Ultimately, we don’t get to vote on the nature of change. It happens with or without us. As my 97-year-old Grandpa would say: “After God’s faithfulness, the only other thing you can count on in this life is change.” The nature of change is changeless. The following verse somewhat eases that haunting presence of change in my life and ministry: Let us walk in step with the Spirit (Galatians 5:25). Our job is not to determine whether we are changing too fast or too slow. As followers of Christ, our primary task is to prayerfully and genuinely seek God’s will for specific changes in our lives. And then throw our whole beings into moving with the pace and direction of the Holy Spirit! The question of whether we should change or not has already been answered for us: God’s in the transformation business! The presence of Jesus Christ in your life means that God’s Spirit is continually working to reform and renew you as his follower. And us as his church. With or without us, God is constantly blowing his fresh and wonderfully haunting wind of change into our lives. He might even occasionally incite change for change’s sake. (Now that would blow my own status quo paradigm on change out of the water!) Even with the best of New Year’s intentions, most of the time we won’t change without sufficient motivation to do so. Here’s some: If you’re not changing, you’re dying. And even more, if we’re not changing and adapting with the movements of God’s Spirit in our lives, others will die too. Innumerable “others” are waiting to be reached by your individual life of committed and active discipleship—and by a church that is open and adaptable enough to jog, run, and even sprint at times with the Holy Spirit as we bring the changeless message of Jesus Christ to our ever-changing culture. On January 1st, 2008 the whole year and future lie ahead of us. What if we, in our personal lives and in our ministries at Grace, carried this fresh, uninhibited perspective on change well beyond the first days of 2008? What if you lived in a posture of change, ready to run with more energy and determination than ever before? Sounds like a New Year’s resolution… “Lord, help me to walk in pace with your Spirit: Not too slow, not too fast. Relative to your perfect plans and projections, continually transform and recreate me as someone who is made new in Christ. Form us into your new wineskins, ready and able to receive the new wine that you are pouring into our lives. Amen!” Changing course is never comfortable and rarely safe. And it usually means more work on our end. But if God’s behind it, we can be sure that change will always be good. And that God will be faithful. Count on it. The adventure awaits… Pastor Ryan M Alexander Acknowledgements: A special thanks to the few (of many) dynamic and seasoned leadership gurus at Grace who processed the topic of change with me during the writing of this article. Your feedback and insights have changed me! Also, a huge “thank you” to the people of Grace. Your openness to the movements of God’s Spirit is absolutely inspiring! Lastly, thank you to Pastor Virgil Bjerke, who died shortly after completion of this article. Now you are fully changed…
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