For the past few months, as we have been preparing to return to a regular schedule of weekly in person worship, I have found myself caught between desire for routine and a drive for innovation. There is something so comforting about routine. Stepping into a familiar situation can sometimes be the spiritual and emotional hug one needs. I am the king of routine: I have had the same Christmas dinner for nearly 20 years now (homemade pizza), I used to drop a deposit off at the bank on such a regular schedule that one day I was late, and the bank called to make sure everything was OK. So, a big part of me wants to step right back into Sunday mornings as if nothing had happened—to sit in my same seat, do the same motions, fall into the same routine we were in before, get back to normal.
But I also recognize that it is foolhardy to think that there can ever really be a return to the old normal. We are not the same people, RiverTree is not the same church, our community is not the same community, our nation is not the same nation as it was the last time we were together in Selvidge, in March of 2020. To try to recapture that old normal, would be to ignore 15 months’ worth of hard growth and tumultuous change.
The million dollar question we (and countless other churches) are asking is: how do we balance that comfort of the familiar with that understanding that things have massively changed. We don’t want to prize our own comfort and nostalgia to the point that we become irrelevant. But neither do we want to change and innovate so much that we are unrecognizable from what made RiverTree such an amazing church family in the first place.
Our year plus as a virtual church family gave us a unique opportunity to step back and evaluate not only what ‘church’ means but also how we ‘do’ and ‘live’ church on a week-by-week and day-by-day basis. During this time, we have been forced to get creative with just about everything we do. Some things worked amazingly well (our virtual book club and painting nights), while other things did not work at all (remember quarantine cooking? Apparently not, because no one watched them, ha ha!). One of my biggest fears, as we transition back, is losing that creative spark we fostered so well over the past 15 months. I want us to be a group of people, a church family, that is not afraid to share ideas, is not afraid to be creative, and is not afraid to fail.
I wish I had the perfect answer to this riddle. But I don’t, and I would be a little wary of anyone who says that they do have it all figured out. But I am excited to work on figuring this out together, with all of you. “In what ways should we stay the same?” and “In what ways should we innovate?” are questions I want us to wrestle with as a church family. Let me know what you think, I would love to hear from you all!
