Going in the wrong direction
Our family’s first outing beyond our neighborhood after Barcelona’s long, strict quarantine period was surreal. Taking the metro/subway after staying within such a small radius felt foreign, as was thinking about social distancing on a transport meant to accommodate people standing shoulder to shoulder.
It was to be the second visit to the home of a couple of friends, so I was navigating the not-so-familiar route with my phone. My phone’s GPS (also apparently out of practice of traveling) proceeded to take us in the wrong direction a handful of times, adding considerable stress to an already-stressful situation. Eventually, we arrived and were reconnecting with Chris and Michael with great joy.
I suspect that from time to time this happens to everyone who uses their mobile phone to navigate. You’re on your way somewhere just familiar enough to know it clearly has no idea which way you’re heading. You may know you’re on a sidewalk facing North while the phone says you’re on the other side of the road facing another direction.
When this happens, there’s a process where you can calibrate your phone’s internal compass. It involves tilting it back and forth or moving it around in the shape of an eight. While this sometimes causes people around you to look at you like you’ve gone crazy, afterward your phone is once again able to take you to where you’re supposed to go.
Calibration Moments
The institutional church is at a “Calibrate your Phone’s Compass” moment. To be fair, this is a reoccurring phenomenon in the Judeo-Christian story. There are many stories in the scriptures of faithful individuals and communities choosing to calibrate their compasses. In fact, the Christian church was birthed out of just such a moment.
In John 21:2-3, we find some of the disciples after Jesus’ murder, their worlds turned upside down. Simon Peter, who grew up in a fishing village, looks at his options:
“Simon Peter said to them, ‘I am going fishing.’ They said to him, ‘We will go with you.’ They went out and got into the boat, but that night they caught nothing.”
Going fishing was probably the most logical decision Simon Peter could have made. He was simply doing what he knew to make an honest living. The next morning, we find Jesus watching them on the shore. Seemingly not surprised by their lack of success, he helps them fill their nets and the disciples come back to shore to have breakfast with him.
After, Jesus confronts Simon Peter on his choice to return to the comfortable, secure trade he knew from before they met.
“Do you love me? Feed my lambs, tend my sheep, feed my sheep.”
In this story, we see Simon Peter moving in the wrong direction – back to the comfortable, acceptable life he had before. Jesus then presents him with a “calibration moment.” In that moment, Simon Peter adopts his new direction, which leads him to establish the Christian church and fulfilling Jesus’ promise that he’ll be a “fisher of men.”
Crossroads
If you look at the story of our faith as a narrative, then you can see many of these defining, pivotal moments where faithful individuals and communities are faced with a very specific crossroads: 1) Continue (or return to) the status quo or 2) redefine their identity and structures to be what God needs them to be.
The idea of a crossroads may be problematic to some because it implies it’s possible to reject God’s invitation to be part of the bigger story. God passing over the unwilling for the willing is uncomfortable, but it is possible and it happens more often than not. God gives individuals and communities a choice on which path they go down. God allows us to a lot of things that are contrary to what God desires. It’s totally possible for the well-meaning and good-hearted to miss out on something special God has in the works. God will keep offering such opportunities until they’re taken up and acted upon.
A few more moments where the difficult, lesser-traveled road was selected:
Hebrew Bible
Abraham agrees to a covenant with God
Moses is confronted by the burning bush and chooses to be a champion for the Israelites
The Israelites leave Egypt where they’ve been for a very long time (they actually complain and want to return because the change was so difficult)
The Israelites, for a long time a nomadic tribe, settle down and build the Temple
The temple is destroyed and the Israelites are scattered
New Testament
Each time one of Jesus’ disciples choose to leave their old life to follow him
The disciples figuring out how to move forward after Jesus
The early church establishing themselves and learning to make community with non-Jews
Through the Ages
Reformers like Martin Luther and the Early Anabaptist who rejected a very established way of doing church to discover new ways
The Spanish Mennonites who decided they were not going back to the old ways of doing things when returning to Spain after the Franco dictatorship
In each of these cases, the change was often unimaginably difficult and required great faith in God. It demanded the old, comfortable formulas for doing things be let go. In the case of the Israelites, they actually regretted their decision to leave Egypt for decades as they wandered the desert.
But, in the end, the choice (at least on a collective level) was made to move towards something rather than doing what was comfortable. And the outcome was often massive — defining moments of God orchestrating something big.
The time is now
This is why I say we are also in a very specific “calibration moment” both as a society and as a church. If society is your phone, then the COVID-19 pandemic is the thing that’s made it stop working long enough to recognize areas where it needs to be calibrated.
Worshipping with Trinity Mennonite of Hillsboro, KS, earlier this year. Their community developed a creative system to ensure folks of all levels of tech competence could participate.
Societally, we see this happening in the United States in the form of racial injustice entering the public discourse in a big way, creating a renewed acknowledgment and rejection of systematic racism and a movement that says the way we police our society must change. To that, we say, “Hallelujah, let justice come swiftly like a river!”
In the church, we very visibly see the consequences of many USAmerican churches aligning themselves with nationalism and partisan politics, with some of the least Christ-like things coming out of the mouths of those claiming to be Jesus followers. To this, we say, “God have mercy on us.”
The church’s need for calibration couldn’t be more clear. All of creation groans in labor pains and communities of folks committed to radically following Jesus are needed now more than ever. With church growth in decline throughout Europe and much of the rest of the Western world, it’s also clear that the old formulas being used for doing church have become less and less effective.
Before the pandemic, the crossroads may have not been clear for many faith communities, as the status quo tends to cause us to operate on autopilot. However, as the status quo now isn’t even an option for most churches right now, is there a better time to reconfigure a community’s structures and habits?
“Hold your horses, we’ve got to get back to a stable place before we change things too much.” This is a sentiment we’ve heard often when talking about post-Christendom faith communities seeking a new way forward for the institutional church. I get that and recognize I sometimes tend to push for change more quickly than folks thing I should. But here’s the thing: to all you faith communities that continue to try to figure out what it means to meet in the midst of a pandemic, you’ve already changed and you did it very rapidly. In a matter of weeks, we re-learned how to do church in ways never thought possible before, with COVID-19 essentially teaching us how to function without formulas that previously seemed irreplaceable.
Imagine how many “golden calves” have been taken out of play and yet life goes on. We don’t even need a building!
Fear is an indicator
“Are you paralyzed with fear? That’s a good sign. Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do. Remember one rule of thumb: the more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it.”
Fear is often the biggest thing that keeps people from embracing change and viewing it as an opportunity — more so now since so much change in our lives is being forced by things beyond our control. This idea of “going back to the way things were” is a natural defense mechanism that sometimes keeps us safe while often preventing us from moving forward. But what specifically are we trying to get back to? What do we miss about that? Is it being together physically? Is it wanting to not have to think so hard all the time about what your community’s Sunday gathering looks like?
As though sitting in a room once a week while experiencing (mostly) one-directional worship and teaching is the best way to encounter the Divine and the richest way to experience community! Yes, Jesus taught in the Temple, but almost everything we know about him takes place outside of it. He and his community where often on the move, living life and doing ministry in public. The early church drew people in not because of how they worshipped, but because of how that worshipped overflowed into the communities around them.
We can do so much better.
Our community in Barcelona has been doing a virtual service since April and my main job has been editing the various videos into a cohesive service. Before COVID-19, the idea of doing a digital service couldn’t have been further from where we were investing energy, but being “forced” into it has caused me to notice something interesting: this format has actually allowed us to live out some of our own values better than we could before. For example, the variety of people involved on a week-to-week basis has exploded! We are also approaching our gatherings with new intentionality and creativity. And, not that it’s a measure of success, but we’re a church that previously had about 25 people meet in person on Sundays now averaging 85 views for every uploaded church service.
I pray the takeaway from the previous paragraph is not that virtual services are the magic bullet that will fix the state of the postmodern, post-Christendom church. For many communities, it has been a vital tool for staying connected and faith communities that desire to be accessible and open really should have some type of digital footprint. However, there has been a gradual shift of faith communities doing “live” viewings of their worship services to folks watching them during the week whenever they have time. It’s not just that virtual services (through no lack of effort by the folks creating them) generally feel incomplete compared to communing and sharing a meal face-to-face with others seeking truth and hope. This shift from a collective to individual experience will have consequences as consumerism constantly seeks its foothold in faith communities.
No, the pandemic hasn’t shown us the way forward, but it has shown that we can adapt and calibrate when we want. We are faced with the same crossroads as our faithful forbearers: 1) attempt to return to the status quo we maintained before the pandemic, recreating the classic Sunday experience as much as possible or 2) redefine our structures, calibrating to the ever-changing needs we find around us.
In the case of our community, I believe we can make our in-person church experience just as rich, intentional, and creative as our virtual one. And our calibration moment is here and now.
Note: this article is adapted from a message shared with Comunidad Evangélica Menonita (Barcelona) on June 14, 2020.
In retrospect, we can pinpoint the spring of 2021 as the time our laughter disappeared — when our four-year ministry in Barcelona began to fall apart. As concerns regarding COVID-19 began to ease, expectations in the local church community changed. Gradually, things arrived at a point where our family needed to step away.
It's hard to laugh when it feels like the world is crumbling around you. It's an act that feels almost audacious considering the state of the world: pandemic losses, church divisions, guilt and anger over White privilege and indirectly benefiting from systemic racism, environmental collapse, rampant economic ruin, and war. How can one laugh when the world we live in is so far removed from the one Jesus describes throughout the gospels?