Changing while God does not
All-Africa Institute for Excellence in Christian Leadership Development
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 4 May 2011
In one of Jesus’ briefest and least quoted parables, the Master commends to his listeners a very fortunate man. Jesus explains to us with striking brevity one of this man’s virtues:
He is capable of making good and even reverential use of those features of God’s economy that come from the past.
The same thing might be said of many human and beings, no doubt. Yet this man stands out from the crowd, as it were, because of a second quality that he exercises together with the first:
He finds it possible to recognize and embrace the new thing that is by God’s grace becoming possible.
You will recognize these words, from the thirteen chapter of the gospel of Matthew:
(Jesus) said to them, ‘Therefore every teacher of the law who has been instructed about the kingdom of heaven is like the owner of a house who brings out of his storeroom new treasures as well as old.’ (Matthew 13:52 NIV)
We come together this week to discuss institutional sustainability and organizational change. Together, the challenge they present can be threatening and ominous, not least because we engage this challenge as frail human beings who struggle to make the best of things even as they now are. Change lies one horizon beyond and can seem a bridge too far.
Change is unsettling. The issues of sustainability that require us to embrace change often come in the form of pressures we would have preferred not to face.
The need to change pushes us onto a playing field whose principal sport we have not mastered. We feel clumsy, inept, and intimidated.
Issues of institutional sustainability demand that we postpone that teaching or research or writing or counseling through which we have observed God’s gifts flowing through us to others in order to focus on life-or-death matters. Frankly, many of us have not felt the breeze of God’s spirit in the movement of our lips or minds or hands in these pressing concerns as we have when employing our more accustomed gifts.
To embrace institutional change is therefore for many of us a precisely sacrificial task. We do it for others. We do it for the school we love. We do it for the students who come to us for shaping and for inspiration and for correction. We do it for still other students whose lives will be empowered by the incursion of our school’s ministry into their lives …. if our organizations still exist and thrive in their day, yet unseen.
Everything about change—even more, everything about leading change—is both unsettling and urgent. That at least is how many of us feel as we face the topics that await our corporate and individual attention this week.
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Where are we to find orientation for the task? With what set of the heart are we to enter the challenge of leading change? Are we to be heavy of heart, grieving the inevitable losses? Or paralyzed with fear in the face of the unknown? Or infused with enthusiasm as we contemplate our envisaged utopia?
None of these states of mind is likely, in my view, either to glorify our Heavenly Father or to forge results that will bless his people.
Rather, I believe we find the promise of help in this cameo appearance in the gospels, this one-sentence description of a ‘teacher of the law’ that falls so unexpectedly from Jesus lips.
Let us hear it again, though not for the last time:
(Jesus) said to them, ‘Therefore every teacher of the law who has been instructed about the kingdom of heaven is like the owner of a house who brings out of his storeroom new treasures as well as old.’ (Matthew 13:52 NIV)
I want to highlight two attitudes—I am tempted almost to call them rules of engagement—that will manifest themselves in our lives and in the culture of our organizations if we listen closely to Jesus’ short parable as we engage institutional sustainability and organizational change.
The first of these attitudes consists of a profound respect for tradition.
The Bible and traditional cultures of our day unite in giving a certain benefit of the doubt to the tradition. Indeed the Bible’s wisdom literature instructs us that the person who does not seek out the wisdom that accumulates in the tradition and understanding of one’s fathers and mothers is a fool.
It seems to me that the Bible and traditional cultures of our day spend a substantial amount of their visual effort on looking back. In contrast, modern Western culture seems culpably intoxicated with looking forward or, perhaps, of not looking at all.
Speaking for the culture of which I am a native son, it seems to me that we are hell-bent on throwing ourselves into forgetfulness and therefore into folly. We are fascinated with what is new and with what is now to the exclusion of that moral patience which issues in reverence for our elders and a profound respect for tradition and legacy, even when these come to us in forms that are cracked and stained.
Sadly, our educational sector is not immune to such charges. I am occasionally dismayed to hear institutions and practices with their own distinguished history held in disdain and contempt by educational reformers who have not taken the time to understand why these have come to be, what the value of their legacy is, and even whether some considerable portion of that inheritance might still serve to our nourishment.
As we face issues of sustainability and the requirement of change, we do well to exercise the humility that allow us to query the traditions we inherit critically but with respect, always suspecting that there is more magic still in them than is immediately apparent.
We will then be like Jesus’ ‘teacher of the Law’, stewards of a valuable and even enchanting store room full of useful old tools and delightful surprises we never knew were in there.
The second of the attitudes that seems necessary if we are to engage change as Christians is courage for the unknown future.
There are several things I do not intend to say about such courage, about this future, and about our faithfulness in it.
First, I do not intend to say that we have a divine guarantee regarding the continued existence of the ministries we serve and that therefore we should be of good cheer and unshaken courage. In fact, as Christians we understand that all institutions are expendable. God does not need them. He rules the future and will see his sovereign and creative will realized in that future as he sees fit. We must not over-reverence the forms that have served us up to the present day.
Second, I do not intend to suggest that we have special insight into the future and should be courageous because we somehow know that the threats to our existence are not so serious after all. With few exceptions, we face change without such special knowledge. I take this ignorance to be the result of God’s knowing that it would not be a good thing for us to have such insight. Our inability to predict the future in detail is a product of our Lord’s mercy rather than his stinginess.
However, we—above all men and women—should find it possible to face the future with courage for one deeply theological reason: our faithful Lord will there be with us when the future comes.
Here I want to direct our attention to one of those biblical statements that is more a distilled restatement of widely disseminated theological truth than a novel revelation of new light.
Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever. (Hebrews 13:8 NIV)
Students of the letter to the Hebrews struggle to explain just why this statement pops out when it does in the context of that ‘letter’s’ homily. It seems to me that it is so fundamental and protean a truth that its applicability is virtually unconstrained. It is a word that rings true and rings effectively in many circumstances.
For our purposes, I find it the sole reason why people like you and me—in an historical moment that brings deconstructive energies pounding down upon the institutions we love—should act with courage rather than with fear.
The Lord who moved capable if trembling hands to build the seminaries and universities that formed us will be present and active as we build the future with our own. This is a motive for confidence, especially in a moment that calls us to change, to re-engineering, to re-design, even to reconstruction.
The context of Jesus’ little parable in Matthew 13 is, after all, the kingdom of God. I continue to believe that the task of shaping disciples via the seminary is as close to the inbreaking of Christ’s rule, his reign, his government, his kingdom, as one can get. So I can only suppose that, if we face the future with courage and a reverence for the past, we shall find in our storehouses ‘new treasures’ that shall lighten our burdens, direct our paths, and cause our crops to grow.
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Sisters and brothers, our calling in becoming like the most fortunate house-owner of Jesus’ parable is not to be antiquarians. Nor is it to become utopians.
• The antiquarian’s god is Stasis.
• His creed is ‘We must always have this!’
• His slavery consists in being bound to only what he has known.
• His besetting sin is distrust of God’s economy.
• The utopian’s god is named Relevance.
• His creed is ‘Everything is different now and I am the one who knows it!’
• His slavery consists in being bound to his own small moment.
• His besetting sin is distrust of the power of Christ’s gospel to run with its own strength.
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Wisdom, it seems to me, nearly always call us to find a path of discernment between two loud and facile alternatives.
Who are we to become as theological educators facing troubling issues of sustainability and the challenge of leading change?
We ought not to become antiquarians, closing our eyes to changing circumstances, lusting for a past or clinging to a present that will never come back to us as we have known it.
We ought not to become utopians, casting aside legacy, tradition, and well-weathered forms in naïve pursuit of a perfection that will never be available to us.
Rather, we should be like the scribe, instructed in the way of heaven’s kingdom, who brings out of his storehouse old, sturdy treasures as well as delightful novelties and inventions.
We can do this if we trust that Jesus, our Emanuel, is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
