In his book Mere Christianity, (If you have not read it you should) C. S. Lewis writes: “Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of — throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards.
You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage, but He is building up a palace. He intends to come and live in it himself.” (Mere Christianity, book IV, chapter 9.)
When God comes in to remake us, renew us into what God intended for us in the first place, there is going to be some pain. That is true in every change that we make. You want to change physically, get in shape, so you start walking. Guess what? Your legs are going to hurt for a while. You want to build some upper body strength, so you start lifting weights or working on exercise machines. Guess what? It’s going to hurt for a while. That is why so many people who start a gym membership quit attending by the end of February. They didn’t realize change was going to be that hard.
It is also true that change in the church is difficult. I don’t know the exact percentage, but I do know that it is high, but if a church goes through a major building project, the minister is gone in under two years from completion. It’s been said that the seven last words of the church are: “We’ve never done it that way before.” We tend to resist change in every area of our lives. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; change for the sake of change rarely leads to success.
Too often we change the things that work and ignore what really needs to be fixed. I’ve seen churches that are constantly changing their music ministry or the structure of their service when what they really need to change is the friendliness of their people to visitors.
The approach to any kind of change in our personal lives or our church ministry should be handled with thoughtfulness and prayerful consideration. “And now God is building you, as living stones, into his spiritual temple.” (1 Peter 2:5)
When I initially commented I seem to have clicked the -Notify
me when new comments are added- checkbox and now every time
a comment is added I receive 4 emails with the same
comment. Perhaps there is an easy method you can remove me from
that service? Cheers!
Turned off the comments. You shouldn’t get any more e-mails.