Unconsidered Momentum

 

There are some phrases which just stick in your mind after you first hear them and ‘unconsidered momentum’ was one of those for me.  I was with a small group of folk who all had a lot of experience in trying to initiate and encourage change and growth in churches in Scotland and we were there to journey together for two days and learn from one another.

It is an interesting phrase, as it implies there is movement, there is even forward movement, but it is not the kind of movement that is necessarily a healthy one.    It represents continuing on a path out of habit, rather than intentional choice, or evaluating whether it is still necessary or beneficial.  Particularly it doesn’t take into account whether goals have changed, or the context has changed which gave rise to the practice in the first place.

Covid was an interesting time as suddenly we were forced to stop a lot of things in our personal and communal lives which we did out of habit.  This included going to church and a lot of activities within church.   There are a number of people who never returned to church after Covid as they became aware that their church attendance had been largely ‘unconsidered momentum’.  

Recently I have had two conversations with church leaders who were able to point to changes they needed to make to their church life which the halt of things during covid simply made it a lot easier to go through with.  It gave folk an opportunity to ask, ‘if we were not already doing this would we start this now??’

We shouldn’t need a pandemic to give us the courage to ask these questions.   We can start by talking about church ‘growth’ using organic and even botanical language as opposed to structural and organisational terms.    In this way we assess the value of something by whether it is life enhancing or  relationship deepening or empowering or spiritually insightful and so on. 

These metrics are very different from quantitative measures, which of course have a place, just as structures do.  If we are to move into a future of hope we need to start doing a lot more considering about our momentum.  For there is no standing still, no neutral gear, our churches are all moving in some direction.  We need to check whether what we do is still fitting the context we are in, or the changing demographics, is it still beneficial and if so to who and who are the people who are not here?

As Steve Aisthorpe writes in “Re-Wilding the Church”  ‘The trouble with listening is you don’t know what you will hear until is too late.  Listening is a risky, threshold activity’ .  And this listening is multi directional: to our own hearts, to scripture, to our neighbours in the community, to God,  to others within the church.   

It is exciting though…I for one would rather not live too much of my life as unconsidered momentum ( we will not be able to avoid it entirely!).

 
I’d like to end with a wonderful quote from the film Conclave when the Cardinals are in a heated discussion about the nature of the church and a rather minor figure says from the back ‘Church is what we do next’.