Not following the trends
26/03/14 05:10
Mayhaps the canker-blosoms distracteth thy attention on the Sunday most recently passeth. Twas anniversary numbered 450 of the birthing of William Shakespeare and celebrated with pomp, with triumph, and with reveling in Chicago, wherewith Mayor Rahm Emmanuel didst proclaim “Talk Like Shakespeare Day.”
We missed it entirely amidst all of the activities of the third Sunday of Lent in our congregation. The 450th birthday of the Bard on April 23 seems like an occasion worth noting in an English-speaking church. We have been told that Shakespeare and the King James Version of the Bible were two of the major factors in the standardization of spelling and grammar within the English language. Even though we no longer speak the language of Shakespeare, the popularity of the plays he wrote over four centuries ago has contributed to our being able to speak with the majority of the world’s citizens in a common language.
Happy birthday to thee!
Happy birthday to thou!
Happy birthday William Shakespeare!
Let us partyeth right now!
OK, perhaps there is more to writing a memorable couplet than having caught, albeit a few days late, the birthday of the famous poet and playwright.
One of the realities of life in the church is that we have a small sense of our place in history. We know that the story of God and the people of God didn’t start in our generation and we know that it does not end with the end of our lives on this earth. But our ability to imagine the vast scope of history is very limited. We focus most of our attention on the present. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that we focus most of our attention on the recent past.
There seem to be two competing forces that remain at work within most communities and virtually all institutions. On the one hand, there are voices that want us to remain trendy and on the cutting edge of culture. There is a certain lag in those voices in most institutions. Most of the time I hear something like “why can’t we be more like . . .? The request really isn’t for us to be innovators, but rather somehow more like the places that are considered to be trendy or innovative. Staying on the cutting edge of popular culture is not one of the things that we in the midwest do with any grace at all. We were pleased, recently, to finally get Starbucks coffee shops in our community. The Starbucks stores in Rapid City are popular meeting places and the frappuccinos and vanilla macchiatos are being dispensed at a high rate. The warm décor, the gentle music, the faux-Italian lingo, are all the rage in my town right now.
We don’t realize how passé, how utterly banal, that has become in more trendy places like San Francisco. And, trust me, by the time we have a Blue Bottle in Rapid City, that will no longer be considered to be trendy in Silicon Valley.
The truth is that the best coffee in Rapid City - not to mention the best toast - is still being dispensed in private homes, not in commercial establishments with names that are recognized in the cities.
We don’t do “cutting edge” very well.
And that is part of the charm of this place. But it can be frustrating when someone suggests that our church ought to imitate someone else who is imitating someone else who is imitating someone else who doesn’t realize that Willow Grove hasn’t been the most innovative thing in Christianity for decades now if it ever was.
At the same time that we find ourselves far from the forefront of innovation, we also discover voices that resist change of any kind. We joke about “We’ve always done it that way,” being the motto of the church whose seven last words will be “We’ve never done it that way before.” But there is real truth in our resistance to change of any kind within the institutional church. From my perspective this is more obvious in the Conference and national settings of the church than it is at the local level. Our church is constantly growing and changing and doesn’t do things at all the way we did them 20 years ago, but at the Conference level, we organize ourselves with the same structure and conduct our business so much like the way we did it 50 years ago it is almost compical. Our congregation is hosting the Conference Annual Meeting this year and the resistance to innovation is incredibly striking to us. The schedule of the meeting can’t be adjusted. We have to have workshops. Business sessions must take up a prescribed amount of time although no one can tell me what business there is to come before the group other than election of officers and passing of a budget. We tried to change the workshops from talk sessions with a single leader to hands on experiences, but each week I receive several more suggestions for “workshops” that are opportunities for someone to tell us about something that person has done. We tried to introduce the style of graphics and visual images that we’ve been using in our congregation for a decade now and were told that no one had the software to handle our graphics and our computer files were too large for the technologies available. When we offered to do the printing we were told that it wouldn’t work. I’ve been lectured about why we need paper meal tickets and why the only way to organize those tickets is to put them in plastic pockets attached to string lanyards and worn around the neck. Our attempt to change the type of name tags was rejected without a conversation.
The meeting won’t be different from last years. Which may be all right because the people won’t be changed very much, either. This isn’t a gathering that is good at attracting or welcoming new participants, which might explain why the attendance has dropped rather dramatically since the last time we hosted the event.
Maybe if we went back to the King James Version of the Bible and all talked like Shakespeare . . .
We humans are funny creatures. We want to change, but we don’t know how. We sense that we belong to something bigger than ourselves, but we can’t conceive of it. Our default mode is the familiar and whenever we feel threatened we retreat to the way we’ve always done it.
The good news is that God’s Spirit isn’t restrained by our human silliness. God isn’t worried about what is trendy or the way we’ve always done it.
My advice is simple: When you attend the Annual Conference, make sure you catch the worship. God has a way of breaking through and touching us in spite of our silliness.
We missed it entirely amidst all of the activities of the third Sunday of Lent in our congregation. The 450th birthday of the Bard on April 23 seems like an occasion worth noting in an English-speaking church. We have been told that Shakespeare and the King James Version of the Bible were two of the major factors in the standardization of spelling and grammar within the English language. Even though we no longer speak the language of Shakespeare, the popularity of the plays he wrote over four centuries ago has contributed to our being able to speak with the majority of the world’s citizens in a common language.
Happy birthday to thee!
Happy birthday to thou!
Happy birthday William Shakespeare!
Let us partyeth right now!
OK, perhaps there is more to writing a memorable couplet than having caught, albeit a few days late, the birthday of the famous poet and playwright.
One of the realities of life in the church is that we have a small sense of our place in history. We know that the story of God and the people of God didn’t start in our generation and we know that it does not end with the end of our lives on this earth. But our ability to imagine the vast scope of history is very limited. We focus most of our attention on the present. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that we focus most of our attention on the recent past.
There seem to be two competing forces that remain at work within most communities and virtually all institutions. On the one hand, there are voices that want us to remain trendy and on the cutting edge of culture. There is a certain lag in those voices in most institutions. Most of the time I hear something like “why can’t we be more like . . .? The request really isn’t for us to be innovators, but rather somehow more like the places that are considered to be trendy or innovative. Staying on the cutting edge of popular culture is not one of the things that we in the midwest do with any grace at all. We were pleased, recently, to finally get Starbucks coffee shops in our community. The Starbucks stores in Rapid City are popular meeting places and the frappuccinos and vanilla macchiatos are being dispensed at a high rate. The warm décor, the gentle music, the faux-Italian lingo, are all the rage in my town right now.
We don’t realize how passé, how utterly banal, that has become in more trendy places like San Francisco. And, trust me, by the time we have a Blue Bottle in Rapid City, that will no longer be considered to be trendy in Silicon Valley.
The truth is that the best coffee in Rapid City - not to mention the best toast - is still being dispensed in private homes, not in commercial establishments with names that are recognized in the cities.
We don’t do “cutting edge” very well.
And that is part of the charm of this place. But it can be frustrating when someone suggests that our church ought to imitate someone else who is imitating someone else who is imitating someone else who doesn’t realize that Willow Grove hasn’t been the most innovative thing in Christianity for decades now if it ever was.
At the same time that we find ourselves far from the forefront of innovation, we also discover voices that resist change of any kind. We joke about “We’ve always done it that way,” being the motto of the church whose seven last words will be “We’ve never done it that way before.” But there is real truth in our resistance to change of any kind within the institutional church. From my perspective this is more obvious in the Conference and national settings of the church than it is at the local level. Our church is constantly growing and changing and doesn’t do things at all the way we did them 20 years ago, but at the Conference level, we organize ourselves with the same structure and conduct our business so much like the way we did it 50 years ago it is almost compical. Our congregation is hosting the Conference Annual Meeting this year and the resistance to innovation is incredibly striking to us. The schedule of the meeting can’t be adjusted. We have to have workshops. Business sessions must take up a prescribed amount of time although no one can tell me what business there is to come before the group other than election of officers and passing of a budget. We tried to change the workshops from talk sessions with a single leader to hands on experiences, but each week I receive several more suggestions for “workshops” that are opportunities for someone to tell us about something that person has done. We tried to introduce the style of graphics and visual images that we’ve been using in our congregation for a decade now and were told that no one had the software to handle our graphics and our computer files were too large for the technologies available. When we offered to do the printing we were told that it wouldn’t work. I’ve been lectured about why we need paper meal tickets and why the only way to organize those tickets is to put them in plastic pockets attached to string lanyards and worn around the neck. Our attempt to change the type of name tags was rejected without a conversation.
The meeting won’t be different from last years. Which may be all right because the people won’t be changed very much, either. This isn’t a gathering that is good at attracting or welcoming new participants, which might explain why the attendance has dropped rather dramatically since the last time we hosted the event.
Maybe if we went back to the King James Version of the Bible and all talked like Shakespeare . . .
We humans are funny creatures. We want to change, but we don’t know how. We sense that we belong to something bigger than ourselves, but we can’t conceive of it. Our default mode is the familiar and whenever we feel threatened we retreat to the way we’ve always done it.
The good news is that God’s Spirit isn’t restrained by our human silliness. God isn’t worried about what is trendy or the way we’ve always done it.
My advice is simple: When you attend the Annual Conference, make sure you catch the worship. God has a way of breaking through and touching us in spite of our silliness.