Photo by Javier Allegue Barros on Unsplash
By Steve Matthews
Senior Missional Consultant, FaithX
I have experienced the “path of life” long enough to walk alongside many friends and relatives through the terrain of aging and death. Even so, I try not to think about age as a number, but as I see those numbers getting higher for myself, I begin to think about shoring up my defenses from the possibilities of what may be around the next corner. We spend a lot of time and money in this country trying to fend off the inevitable effects of decline, sickness, and aging. We buy long-term care insurance, invest in retirement accounts, and vow to live healthier—all to stay active, healthy, and financially secure for as long as possible.
None of this is bad, and yet I have seen many of my older friends and family faced with change they could not predict nor prepare for. There is not enough money or planning to stop the unpredictable effects of aging, but it feels like the story we tell ourselves is, “If I can just get it right, I can live into the future I envision.” Wouldn’t it be great if that was true? But we cannot avoid the constancy of change.
If you think change is not constant, just observe the seasons changing, or share your experience of surviving a hurricane, or earthquake, or wildfire. Nature is a great teacher when it comes to working with change. Even with the reality of change, we still spend a lot of time, energy and money trying NOT to embrace change (or to control it). Consider these words by New Zealand poet, James K. Baxter:
If you and I were woken suddenly
By the drums of Revolution in the street –
Or suppose the door shot open, and there stood
Upright and singing a young bullfighter
With a skin of rough wine, offering to each of us
Death, sex, hope — or, even just an
Earthquake, making the trees thrash, the roofs tumble,
Calling us loudly to consider God –
Let us admit, with no shame whatever,
We are not that kind of people;
We have learned to weigh each word like an ounce of butter;
Our talent is for anger and monotony –
Therefore we will survive the singers,
The fighters, the so-called lovers — we will bury them
Regretfully, and spend a whole wet Sunday
Arguing whether the corpses were dressed in black
or red.
In the Christian calendar we find ourselves halfway between Easter and Pentecost – a time when our status-quo understanding of death is shattered, and instead there is an invitation to the wildness and power and unpredictability of new life beckoning us down the path. Even so, many of our congregations and judicatories cling to what they have known – afraid of the cost of innovation and possibility and not realizing the cost of silencing the “singers, the fighters, the so-called lovers” who yearn for support and a good hearty “yes” to possibility beyond the status quo.
In the business world, this resistance is known as “status quo bias,” defined by the Wharton School of Business as, “the preference for maintaining one’s current situation and opposing actions that may change the state of affairs… Simply put, status quo bias negatively affects your ability to make decisions. Your ingrained preference for stability keeps you from judging different options fairly, which may cause you to miss out on valuable opportunities.”
How is status quo bias active in your congregation, judicatory… in your life? What might it mean for you to embrace the ambiguity of this path between what was and what is to come? How will you encourage the voices around you who have a song of possibility yearning to be heard more broadly? What systemic shifts are necessary to honor change and innovation within your institution?
