Is it trouble to be reformed? If you break the word down into its parts, really study it in the pages (or on the website) of Mirriam-Webster, a discovery is quickly made. To reform, to be reformed, to be reforming , is a troublesome and complex process. It can mean to improve condition through the removal of faults or abuses (that's hard work!). It can mean to put an end to evil by applying a better method or charting a new course of action (that's even harder work!). Or it can mean to be changed for the better (seems easy but success depends on what is meant by 'the better').
Laws are reformed. Churches are reformed. Sports teams can be reformed. Sometimes people are reformed. Sometimes institutions are reformed.
But just as it is hard to make something, or to form something, it is hard to reform something. It is hard to change. Change threatens as much as it invigorates. Change challenges our assumptions, it can threaten our memories, and it can make us uncomfortable. Almost any time a change is introduced there are camps of equal excitement: one in love with the innovation and in one devoted to nostalgia. Human beings seem caught in a conundrum of sorts: too little change feels like stagnation and too much change feels like instability.
The Presbyterian Church (USA) inherits its theological core from the Reformed Church, a way of being church that grew out of the great Reformation of the 16th Century. In our collective memories are names like Calvin, Knox, Witherspoon. We emphasize a church ordered by representative and elected bodies, deliberate decision making, a theology that is devoted to a sovereign God that elects, or chooses the people of God in the grace of Christ Jesus, and an understanding that the Holy Spirit is energizing compulsion behind all we do to seek the great ends of the church. We proclaim the gospel, nurture the people, work for justice, serve our neighbors, fellowship with one another, and teach the scriptures and the faith not only because it is the right thing for the church to do. We make these witnesses in the world because it is God's will that we do so.
The tension arrives in the fact that reformation was never supposed to stop. We were never supposed to get too comfortable with the way things had become. The past was supposed to ground the future, not define it. The church reformed was supposed to be the church always reforming. And as I wrote above, too little changes feels like stagnation, too much becomes instable.
Three weeks ago we marked Reformation Sunday, when we remembered those brave women and men who took a stand for the faith in some incredibly courageous and inspiring ways. They risked life and limb in order that the church would be true to the gospel of grace. They took stands: some of them difficult, unpopular, and misunderstood. In some ways I think that much of the tension in church and culture today is that greater global awareness, greater economic tension, greater technological abilities, and greater social unrest are causing a conversation which is starting to sound like a "new reformation." Scholars and preachers are starting to discuss this possibility. I think they are right. Change has washed ahore. Now what to do?
Here at White Memorial, as we look towards 2012, we're going to redesign our church website, we are going to revisit the Holy Conversations report, and we going to pray about strategically positioning ourselves for the next decades of ministry in Raleigh and New Hope Presbytery. This might mean reforming a thing or two. May God grant us grace and confidence as we explore what it means to be reformed in the decades to come.
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