Posted By Jackson Watts on Dec 10, 2018 | 7 comments

Lately I’ve heard of several churches preparing to interview prospective pastors. I often think that I would like to be a fly on the wall of those interview rooms. I’m fiercely curious about the questions that search committees ask prospective hires and the questions these men ask those committees. Much of what is said—and perhaps more of what is left unsaid or unasked—will have profound implications for the church’s ministry for the foreseeable future.

One topic that sometimes surfaces in these interviews is change; “What is the church’s attitude toward change?” asks the prospective pastor. “What are some things you may want to change if the church calls you?” asks a search committee member. These questions, or some variation of them, are risky. They can spell doom for the candidate who is too specific. They can provoke dodgy glances among committee members as they try to answer, but not say enough to frighten the man.

The inability to discuss change intelligently in the local church is an indictment of contemporary ministry. If we cannot discuss something that not only does happen, as a matter of fact, in every arena of human life, but also something that must sometimes happen, where does that leave us? Satan is especially pleased when we avoid naming the elephant in the room. But this elephant isn’t just mildly standing in the corner; he’s blocking the doorway so no one can enter or exit.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking and reading about change, and trying to lead it in a local church. I daily live this reality. It seems that I’m always learning something new in the course of walking with individuals through personal change or with groups of people through organizational change. In this article, I’ll identify and explain an overlooked, under-addressed reason why change is so hard in the church.

An Unholy Logic?

Change fails for a number of reasons. Sometimes leaders lack sufficient resources to initiate a change. At times a congregation or appropriate body adopts change, but a lack of trained volunteers means that the new ministry initiative fails quickly. Other times a pastor never attempts any changes because he lacks the courage to propose it or to argue for it. These are just a few of perhaps a thousand reasons why change either never leaves the ground, or soon crashes into a nearby field.

Note that there is nothing especially intellectual about these above examples. While conservative churches, especially smaller ones, are often accused of insularity, being insular isn’t always a function of people not using reason. It is the result of their reasoning in a certain way: “We have judged that we want to limit ourselves to only what we have known throughout our collective memory.” There is reasoning at work, but many will recognize that this is more about sentiment, feeling, and gut-level emotion than any kind of grand intellectual argument against change.

People often miss legitimate, underlying intellectual arguments against change that often surface among these same groups of people. It is broad in nature, undiscriminating, and theological. Here’s what it sounds like:

“God doesn’t change. Therefore, we shouldn’t change.”

A more sophisticated version sounds like this:

“God doesn’t change. The Bible doesn’t change. Therefore, God’s church shouldn’t change.

Another potential variation could be,

“We say we need to make such changes in light of changing times. However, doesn’t the Bible warn against accommodating ourselves to the world? We don’t want to compromise and become a worldly church.”

While perhaps only a few church leaders have been met with these kinds of concerns in the face of proposing different changes, these sentiments do occasionally surface. Even when they don’t verbally surface in a church business meeting, my guess is that they are sometimes the hidden force behind the resistance of the “we’ve never done it that way”/”we’ve always done it this way” crowd.

One can understand the power of such arguments when they are taken at face value. After all, the Bible does address the problem of worldliness and ungodly accommodation. And one can imagine a mature church member being dubious about how making cosmetic changes with things like service times or church names is going to bring significant renewal—which is sometimes the implicit assurance of leaders—when basics like evangelism aren’t being equally emphasized.

Those leading change often aren’t adequately prepared for this challenge. All of the leadership literature I’ve read discusses the importance of creating a sense of urgency prior to leading change. All of it discusses the importance of buy-in from key leaders and stakeholders in the organization (or church). All of it discusses the importance of generating the “short-term wins” necessary to build confidence and momentum, preparing the organization for reaching the mountaintop of where it has set out to go. I have never read a church leadership book that has dealt with what I’ve described above—call it the “the illogic of change.”

A Counter Logic?

The illogic of church change is essentially this: Change in the church—aside from personal repentance—runs counter to the biblical values of permanence, tradition, stability, and resistance to the spirit of the age. This illogic is partly about peoples’ gut-level feelings about changing “spiritual things.” Imagine that a Sunday evening service is cancelled due to some special service on a Sunday morning. A member remarks at midweek service the following Wednesday, “I just feel wrong when I’m not in church,” referring to having not attended on Sunday night. This is a normal sensibility for many who were raised to be in church every time the doors were opened.

What I’m talking about here, though, is the intellectual side of that sense that stymies change and leaves the leader exasperated. He has taught people to be wise, to be faithful, and not to be “tossed to and fro” by their age. Now those teachings are being applied in an undesirable way: to reject change.

My proposal is two-fold: First, I hope that, simply by sketching this out as I have above, I’ve provided some insight to those leading change. Hopefully it alerts us to ensure that we are better forming disciples to envision how Scripture’s themes and warnings might be applied reasonably, with discernment, in ways the Spirit intended. But second, whenever leaders are envisioning a particular change or preparing to lead that change, they need to prepare to identify the holes or limits in the arguments against of change that critics may verbalize. I’ll give a few examples of a counter logic.

“It’s true that change can be bad and even ungodly. But isn’t the design of salvation itself change? The Bible teaches that conversion is the beginning of our salvation, not the end. Our sanctification involves God’s Spirit making us more like Him, over time, until the day we meet Him. Wouldn’t that include our whole congregation? And how well we’re doing things? The moment we say we believe in sanctification, we’re saying we believe in change.”

“We absolutely need to be slow to make just any change in our ministry to reach people. We need to fast, pray, and make sure we’re sharing the gospel. However, if we’re unwilling to consider modest, principled adjustments to better enable us to reach people, are we perhaps being guilty of some version of the sins that caused the apostles to struggle to receive Gentiles into the church?”

“When we don’t change due to principle, doesn’t that assume we’re already perfect? Aren’t we basically saying, ‘Thank God we’ve already got everything right!’ Is that not what the Bible calls pride, which God opposes?”

The illogic of church change, however articulated, often comes across as self-purifying, pious, and high-minded. It may be sincere, and therefore it requires a sincere response. But sometimes it’s a ploy to disguise a desire simply not to change. However, we must employ counter-logic and force others to respond on equally biblical terms, which then can reveal how sincere the original objection is [1].

The Future of Unchanging Churches

In the end, churches that don’t change in biblically appropriate ways are like an ignorant patient. They’ve usually been repeatedly told by their cardiologist to quit smoking, to stop eating at buffets three times a week, and to start exercising (all changes). But they tempt God by saying, “Hey, when it’s my time, I’ll go. Who am I to think I can tell Him otherwise?”

But what if another state of affairs is true? What if God, in the normal course of things, intends that His people affect when it’s “their time” through treating their bodies as temples? People with one-track minds fail to take into account all of ways the biblical account challenges us to think clearly about self, church, and change.

God is patient with all of our churches, but if His patience wore thin with the Israelites, with Judah, and with the churches at Ephesus and Laodicea, why do we think He’ll be patient forever? Remember, Peter repented and God used him. His fears and failures were overcome with the logic of grace, and God used him to change the religious scene of the world forever. Now, what might God ask of your church?

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[1]I would qualify this by saying that we want to avoid getting into useless arguments with obstinate people. If we’re talking about just one or two people, I would urge people to have a personal conversation. The only time I would envision a public stating of our counter-logic would be if we have reason to believe that the illogic is shared by many of the members, even if only a few are communicating it aloud.

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