Generational Change

Change. It is a hot topic these days as many people find themselves dissatisfied with the status quo. In all of our recent talk about change we seem to have forgotten an important fact.

It often takes as long to change the status quo as it took to establish it.

We know this is true from experience. If you spend ten years adding weight to your physical frame, don't expect it to come off in ten weeks. If you spend ten years building your debt portfolio (car, credit cards, school loans, etc.), don't expect to be debt free in ten weeks.

Most pastors and ministry leaders will nod in agreement to these points; they are things we regularly speak about. But, let us bring it home into the church realm.

If we have spent ten years (or more) building mediocrity and apathy into our churches, why do we expect them to become missional in ten weeks (or even ten months)? People will give lip service to things like life-long commitment to a vision, but few actually mean it.

Everyone wants to sign up to be Gideon; called to change one day, and seeing God's deliverance soon after. Fewer want to sign up to be Moses, who was called, then sent to 40 years of training, then served for 40 years, and then asked to turn the ministry over to someone else before ever entering the promised land.

Imagine if God revealed a fool-proof plan that guaranteed in twenty years your church or denomination would begin growing 100% each year. Would you sign up for that plan?

What if you got to the fine print and read that the next nineteen years will see mostly internal change and very little external fruit. To top it off the twenty-year plan has someone else's name at the top of the leadership chart.

Is the plan still as appealing as it was at first? Would you still be willing to commit the next twenty years of your life to the plan knowing you may never see the fruit?

Our culture has infected us with such "new" and "fast" mentality that we have a hard time talking about generational change. We spent a generation getting where we are; what if it requires a generation to get back on track?

It is true that nothing is impossible with God. He can turn a nation to himself in mere days (see Nineveh and Jonah). It is also true that God is not as concerned with our calendar as our character. If it takes forty years for Him to mold us into a usable vessel that is acceptable to Him.

Is it acceptable to us?