The Light at the End of the Tunnel

 The release of a COVID  vaccine this week has stirred a multitude of emotions across our nation ... not the least of which is hope. We now have tangible hope that this pandemic experience will come to an end. It will no longer dictate our lives or rob us of our ability to make life what we want it to be. There is a light at the end of the tunnel ... and it doesn't appear to be a train coming at us! We can almost taste the sweet sense of relief. 

I am just as ready as the next person for this experience to be over. As I said in my post this past Sunday (December 13), I am weary. Coping with the pandemic is a part of my weariness (not all of it, but definitely a contributor). But I can't help but wonder: have we been so consumed with coping with this pandemic and the restrictions that have been imposed that we may have missed the gift(s) it offers? 

I know my question sounds ludicrous. We are not accustomed to speaking of gifts in reference to painful experiences in which we experience great loss. Yet every experience - including painful ones - bears gifts if we are open to receive them. The gifts come in the form of opportunity. 

Every end brings a new beginning. We struggle with the new beginning because it always brings life that is different from what was. Clinging to life as it was, we don't always recognize the opportunity to begin again, much less embrace it. Sometimes, we simply don't want it. We don't want to start over. We don't want life to be different (even though it already is!). 

(Obviously, just because something is reality doesn't mean we have to accept it! But let's be clear: this refusal to deal with reality is how we get stuck. It is how we resist change. It is how we avoid growing emotionally-relationally-spiritually. It is how we make ourselves miserable. It is our insisting on the right to play God, dictating how we want life to be. But I digress.) 

I fear a missed opportunity will be the reality for most churches. We have lamented the inability to gather for worship and spiritual community as we once did. We have chaffed under the restrictions. Some have even gone so far as to defy the restrictions, meeting together in spite of them. (The government can't tell me what to do! They can't take away my rights!)  

Now that there appears to be an end in sight - the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel - we can hardly wait to get back to church. We look forward to going back to the way things were before the pandemic interrupted them. 

If that is what we do - go back to the way things were before - we will have missed the opportunity the pandemic offered. I fear most churches (and Christians!) will indeed miss the opportunity. BTW: things can never go back to the way they were. We may try to do so, but it is never completely possible.  

So what is this so-called opportunity of which I speak? 

The pandemic experience brought with it the opportunity to reevaluate - reevaluate what is important (values), reevaluate what we do and how we do it, reevaluate who we are (identity), reevaluate what we are really about (purpose). The pandemic was like a reset button that restores us to the original settings in which our identity and our purpose were clear. Clarity about our identity and our purpose shapes what we do and how we do it. Why determines what and how.

In any social organization, the longer the organization exists, the more it functions out of the past (tradition) and the less it functions out of a sense of identity and purpose. This reality is a recognized principle in organizational science. And it is true of churches ... and maybe especially of churches!

What this principle means for churches and for us Christians is that our church experience becomes more about what is familiar and what we like and expect (i.e., our comfort) than about our growth in Christ. Church involvement becomes a substitute for an active, personal relationship with God rather than a resource that nourishes that relationship.  Church becomes a place of social relationships in a religious context rather than a spiritual community living out of a clear sense of identity and purpose (we are the people of God, the followers of Jesus, the body of Christ, living the ways of the Kingdom, offering the world an alternative way of doing life, i.e., making disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world). 

Whenever we lose our sense of identity and purpose, what we do and how we do it is determined by what we like and what we want. Church becomes about us. You only need to listen to the complaints pastors hear every week to recognize that church has become "about us" rather than about who we are (identity) and what we are about (purpose). 

The COVID pandemic took away what we always did and how we did it. In doing so, it offered us an opportunity to remember why we do what we do. It gave us an opportunity to remember who we are and what we are about. 

But, alas! It seems to me all we want to do is to get back to doing what we have always done, the way we have always done it, with those we did it with before. In our mind, that's what it means to be church. 

The question we haven't asked, much less answered, is: what did God intend church to be? Who has God called us to be? What has God called us to do? Identity and purpose. Why we do what we do and how we do it. 

There is a light at the end of the tunnel! Thanks be to God! 

But does it mean a missed opportunity?