I don't know whether I can explain it. I can only say, I feel a bit different today.
This might not make sense to anyone at all; to be honest, I'm not even sure why I'm going there, but today I feel just a little bit changed - a small, unnoticeable change, that's also somehow enormous. See? Makes no sense. Maybe if I figure out how to say it, I'll return to it specifically.
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A friend of mine asked me today why it would be that we continue to do things in an old way, when everything around us has changed. I thought that was such a pertinent question. This is a season so different to what's gone before, and yet many of us are adapting ourselves to fit our expectations - expectations not of this season, not of the next even, but actually, the familiar, the comfortable, the old.
I suppose it's timescales. Right now we don't know how this ends. The lockdown was indefinite, the pandemic has no cure, the fallout could be decades long - like the wartime generation in September 1939, we have no idea whether the war will be over by Christmas, by 1940, or sometime beyond - we're in the middle of it: how we adapt to it depends entirely on how we think it transitions into whatever might be next. And we may differ about that; we may differ vastly about that.
It's a bit like those peculiar Spring days when you don't know whether or not you need a coat. You take one with you one day, and it's baking hot and you've got to carry your coat around with you. Then the next day when you've learned your lesson, you leave that coat at home - and the sun goes in and it chucks it down as though the clouds are deliberately giving it their all. The only way to change behaviour is to do your best to predict the forecast - and without an idea of what's going to happen, it's really hard to adapt.
That really does feel like where we are. None of us know for sure; the only certainty we have is how things used to be, and subconsciously we find ourselves aiming towards it, precisely because it's the only certainty we know.
So, we do things online in exactly the same way we do them in the room - even though it doesn't make a lot of sense any more. But it would make sense if we knew for sure we were going back to doing things live soon - so if you believe we're eventually going back to that, it doesn't make sense to change our ways at all.
But what if we're not? What if we're moving into a hybrid world where we mix the two? How do we handle that weird, uncharted situation? How do we prepare? How do we pick the right coat?
Take preaching for example. I grew up happily sitting through 30-40 minute messages. Some were well done, engaging and inspiring. You got to the end feeling as though you'd learned something, been inspired by something, and needed to change something. Others were tougher to stay awake through.
But there are generations younger than me now who just can't sit through a 6-minute YouTube clip without flicking to the next one. As soon as they've got the idea of a thing, they're distracted and off to the next exciting shiny video, recommended to them by an algorithm. Even I get sent songs every day on WhatsApp and I rarely ever get through a single one without scrubbing forwards or abandoning it halfway through. I'd apologise for that, but I have a sneaking suspicion that we all do it.
So what chance then for 40 minutes of talking?
You could argue that it's the distraction that's the problem; that we should all have the discipline to do less channel-hopping in our busy minds, and that if we can fix that for our young disciples, we can expect them to make it through the 3-point sermon.
I'm not convinced though. I personally think this is an area that it's up to us to adapt and repackage, somehow without losing the power of that informative, inspiring, life-changing Word. And I think there are creative ways to do it. Crumbs, we even call it 'preaching' - a word that's become so corrupted that it carries the idea of being talked down to in its very core! Why?
Worship's another, super-personal to me. I'm fascinated by how people have been engaging at home, and whether that corporate experience needs to change now, given what we've learned. In lots of ways, it is the thing I go to church to do more than any other thing - I bring an offering, I place it at the altar; we all do, and together those offerings rise up to God in a way that is all the more beautiful. We all really miss it. But what if large elements of that process (the music, the songs, the chord progressions, the lights, the stages) are actually us inventing proscribed ways for others to have an encounter? It seems to me that we've invented a whole bunch of rules about how it should be done, what it should sound like, who gets to hold a guitar and a microphone and why - and if I'm reading my Bible properly, Jesus had quite a lot to say to people who made up their own rules about how others should encounter Father.
It's contentious I know. Don't read too much into it. I'm just wondering whether there might be things it would be wise to lay down in this season, even though many of us don't really want to. True, we don't know how long it will last, but we do know that the world definitely won't look the same on the other side of it. We can't go back to church. And, as I've said before, I'm not entirely sure I want to. So how will we change?
Work too - a colleague of mine, who basically works in a cupboard of developers in Peterborough, is convinced that he's never going back to the office. In his world, social distancing is physically impossible. And even in our open-plan office, it's very difficult. What if the way we work needs to change permanently? What things do we need to let go of, for us to adapt to the new season? What things do we need to pick up? And we're lucky enough to work in offices! What about the people who can't do that?
That question has been on my mind today, as it has been since the first week. What should we lay down? What should we pick up? And what does 'should' mean? What's defining the should? What's our goal? What's the one thing we want to achieve?
I sometimes think we should ask that question more often: what's our goal here? What's the objective? Because I feel like focusing that goal might help us cut out all the things - and I do mean all the things - we currently do that just don't contribute to it.
A small, unnoticeable change. Perhaps this is part of it. Perhaps that's why I feel different today. There's definitely a bit of a sharp logic to my thinking at the moment. I'm absolutely tired of the fuzzy clutter. I want to be very clear in my own mind about what I'm supposed to do, what things I need to leave behind on this adventure, and what new things are there for me to take on the journey. And it feels like this season brings that into focus.
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