As I consider the fact that leadership will often--if not always--deal with change, I appreciate Steven Furtick's reminder that change is messy and often slow. I remember a quote from Rick Warren, which I will butcher in my paraphrase here, in which he essentially said, "Growth always brings change. Change always brings loss. Loss always brings sadness. People--whether or not they want to be--are in a constant state of growth and change." We know that to grow into an adult means to also grow into responsibility; it is also the loss of endless free time and irresponsibility. Growth and change are facts of life. In my anticipation for the future and excitement for potential, I often forget that this new change will bring around loss and sadness for someone else.
And it is this sadness that requires a leader to be a pastor. A good leader will guide his people through this sadness. A bad leader would ignore it. A good leader will move slowly and deliberately in these moments; a bad leader would rush ahead.
I see this applying to the change in people's lives and the change we face corporately. It reminds me of the line from the play Julius Caesar, beware the voices of haste. In dealing with people’s lives—whether it be their personal issues or their church--no matter what the change, it seems that it is better to go slow than to go quickly.
I will comment on this post.
ReplyDeleteThe most compelling line in this blog post was a question, “How many churches are just keeping the machine clean, but not doing any dirty laundry?” I appreciated how you amplified another point regarding the messiness of change, but this question spoke to me in a different way. This reflects more than an unwillingness to change. It addresses the desire throughout much of the church to assume a certain spiritual blindness. There are entire congregations that are based on the idea that only clean people should be in the church. That the church is not a place for sinners or people who need to be redeemed. No, they believe that belonging to the church indicates holiness for the person who is a member and anyone who displays any level of un-holiness should remain outside the church. The problem with that is there are no perfect people in the church. Trying to maintain that façade only pushes dysfunction and sin behind closed doors and underneath the surface. As a result, no one gets healed. The irony of keeping the machine clean is that you end up with the dirtiest laundry of all because you hide the stains and marks rather in order to project the image of cleanliness.
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