No More Business as Usual: The Church Then & Now

Once I was looking through some old pictures at my parent’s house with my youngest son Christian who was 4 years old at the time.  As I strolled down memory lane from pre-school to elementary, from elementary to middle school, from middle school to high school, what joy I felt in my soul. To see where God had brought me from was amazing. I thought about what my dreams were at the particular times those pictures were taken.  Many of the things I dreamed about as a child didn’t come to pass because of decisions made to go in another direction and not only that, in other cases as I got older, I was not willing to do what it took to make my dreams reality.  How often have you known what it took to reach a destination but obstacles, pretty scenery and detours got you off track?  When we get off track, before we know it you we find ourselves on a different road than the one we started on and our original goal and mission has been altered.

As I looked at the pictures, I saw myself.  From my point of view, I had not changed that much, although I had more hair back then and was about 40 pounds lighter.  I remember thinking ‘those were the good old days’. No bills.  No worries.  No real responsibility.  If I could do it all over again! Oh the joy I felt inside. However, that feeling didn’t last long.  My time of reflection was interrupted as I pointed to a middle school football picture of myself.  As Christian looked at the picture, he glanced at me, then back at the picture.  With a look of confusion on his little innocent face, he mouthed these words; “You don’t look like him on the picture.”

“What do you mean?”

“That’s not you daddy.  That’s somebody else.”

What happens when we change to a point that what we once were cannot be seen in what we have become? For the next three minutes, I sat on the couch with my four year old son trying to convince him that the little boy on the picture wearing the number thirty was in fact his daddy, but regardless of what I said, he continuously said, “You don’t look like him on the picture.”

It was not until a few months later the words of my son hit me like a ton of bricks, “You don’t look like the picture.”  Only this time it was not the picture of a seventh grade football player wearing the number 30 that the words were being addressed to.  It was not the voice of an innocent four-year old looking at a picture of his dad some 20 years earlier, but the gentle whisper of the Holy Spirit saying, ‘church of the 21st century, you don’t look like your original self.’

Change is inevitable.  Without it, growth is impossible.  However with change, certain values and foundational principles must remain intact because if they don’t, in the process of change what once was ceases to exist. Pictures are powerful tools.  They show us our good traits, they help us to remember what was once upon a time, and they show us how much we have changed. Everybody at one point are another looks back at some old picture and says if I could get back to that size, or if I could wear my hair like that again, or if I had that six pack again (ripples in the stomach, you no what I mean!).  As powerful as a picture of your physical body may be to inspire you to make a change in your current look or to simply get back to where you once were there is not a more powerful picture of the church than Acts 2.  In this wonderful picture, we see qualities that every good church needs to possess.

What is the church?  Who is it?  Where did it come from?  How did it originally look?  How does it look now?