Specks, Planks and Drinking Glasses

A little over a year ago in preparation for an upcoming event about 20 people helped clean out and reorganize the kitchen at the church. The cleaning was absolutely necessary; the reorganization was meant to make things easier, like moving the dishes and glasses from over the stove to a cabinet next to the door to the Assembly Room. When we were done, we were all pretty proud of the work. Over the past year I’ve watched as glasses and dishes slowly, a few at a time moved back to the cabinet over the stove, back to where they’d been…for years, apparently.

John Kotter, in his book Leading Change, writes how organizations—not just churches—make changes that don’t stick because the people in the organization didn’t buy into the need to change. In churches, we usually think of this battle over change vs. “what was” as between the younger generation and the “grey saints”. Both younger and older generations see that the mainline traditions aren’t working to grow people in numbers or spiritual development, but the older generation wants the congregation to remain the way it was for them for decades even if it means that local church dies, while the younger generation wants to take some risks, do some possibly crazy stuff in an effort to make spiritual life meaningful (again?).

The delicious irony here is it’s not just the older members of the church who gradually took our kitchen configuration back to the old, less sensible, configuration. It was members of all ages.

The 20-somethings are great for accusing the older generations of being stubborn, of trying to take the church backwards in its development and ministries. But here we have a 21st century version of Jesus’ warning about being too concerned about the speck of dust in your friend’s eye you can’t notice the 2×4 plank in your own eye. Regardless of what generation we’re from, we have a blind spot when it comes to seeing our own tendency to go back to “the way things were”.

I understand this desire. I think we all have this unconscious habit in times of stress of going back to old habits, taking up old practices simply because they’re more familiar and therefore seem simpler, easier or more sensible.

So my practice now is going to be looking for those places in my own life where I’m undoing the good changes, and am moving the plates and glasses back to where they were.