When someone new shows up, do things change? You could think of that new family in the neighborhood, that new in-law in the family, or that stranger that started joining in worship a few weeks ago. Does their presence change things? Or are they expected to fit into how things were before they got there?
These questions feel particularly relevant to me right now because I’m switching to a new clergy appointment; I’ll be serving as pastor to a different church. As I move my work and, in a few months, my residence to a new community, will things change because I’m there?
I titled this post “Change Not Change” in reference to a similar, defiant saying that I keep hearing these days. If you call someone out on something they’ve done, there’s a decent chance they’ll raise their chin at you and say “Sorry not sorry,” which is to say “I hear that you’re mad but I don’t care.” It’s a way of standing by what you did. It seems this idea originated with a song by Demi Lovato by that name, but it seems to have captured the popular imagination, and those words–and that sentiment!–keep popping up in day-to-day conversation.
So, in that spirit, I’m offering “change not change” to mean something like “I get it that things oughtta change with you here, but we like it the way it is, thank you very much.”
For the church, it’s the 2020 version of the long-lamented seven last words of the dying church: “We’ve never done it that way before.” It puts me in mind of comments I’ve heard from young people who feel like they’re much sought-after by churches but, once they’re there, their presence and ideas aren’t really welcomed and embraced. It’s as if churches are saying, “We really want you to be here, because we need you, but we aren’t really interested in interacting with you.”
I read a book excerpt recently that put this tension in stark terms, in the slightly different context of immigrants who come into a new community. This author, Amin Maalouf, posits two extreme ideas that bookend the possibilities–which are relevant whether you’re talking about a “host country” (as he does) to which a person has recently immigrated or (as I’m thinking about it) a church or organization where a person is trying to connect:
The host country [may be] a blank sheet of paper on which everyone can write whatever [they] please, …without making any changes in [their] habits or behaviour. [Or] the host country [may be] a page already written and printed, a land where the laws, values, beliefs and other human and cultural characteristics have been fixed once and for all, and where all immigrants can do is conform to them.
Amin Maalouf, My Identity, My Allegiances, end of chapter 1.
It’s the extremes of the change not change question: Do new people come to a blank piece of paper that they can fill however they wish? Or do they have to fit in as cogs in a machine they’d better not break?
Maalouf says neither of these extremes is adequate, thought they are instructive. He suggests a middle ground–in which the receiving country (or, in my appropriation of this metaphor, the receiving community or church) “is neither a tabula rasa, nor a fait accompli, but a page in the process of being written.” (Ibid.)
I love that image. I hope that neither my church, nor yours, will respond to new blood with a dismissive “change not change” attitude. I also hope that I and other “new blood” won’t barrel our way into new spaces like bulls in a china shop, ignorant and careless of the “[rules], values, beliefs and other human and cultural characteristics” that have shaped that community. It would be so easy to fall into a defensive “sorry not sorry” when we’ve careened across a line that didn’t need to ever become an issue.
Instead, what if we could find that middle ground–where there’s respect for the words already on the page but room to continue the story in new ways? I’m excited to imagine those possibilities, both for me and my clergy colleagues, and for others who will find their way into our midst. Let’s turn to one another with a smile and with that holy intention that we can be, as Maalouf says, “a page in the process of being written.”
A page. A chapter. A whole new volume. Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.
Photos by Ibrahim Rifath (blank page) and Bill Oxford (cogs) on Unsplash.
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