Churchiness and Accelerating Change

Quote du jour: If you don't like change, you're going to like irrelevance even less.
~ General Eric Shinseki, Chief of Staff US Army


We are nearing the end of the regular RE year and a year of experimenting with all sorts of new configurations. We've collaborated with another church in the middle school group, extended the Coming of Age year to include all high schoolers, hired a professional pre-school teacher and implemented a trail of Rotation Workshop for the primary ages. It does seem like of lot of changes. Good. One of my ongoing frustrations with UU land is that we tend to stick with things for a long time. Perhaps into the time of irrelevance.

Even our most groundbreaking curriculum, Our Whole Lives, was written before facebook, texting and twitter. We risk irrelevence if we do not attend to the realities of the world our children inhabit or speak to them in the ways they most understand. And yet, because there are many things about church which are timeless, we risk losing the inherent 'churchiness' (I've been watching Colbert) of church if we reach for the 'hook' of technology at the expense of human community.

Church inhabits a constant tension between the contemporary and the ageless. And it's not new to our time, of course. Much of our religious thought and tradition have come from radical change, and resistance to the old order rules, whoever or whatever the old order was. What is new to our time is the rate of acceleration. We do not creep along in increments of weeks, months and years, but leap exponentially from one technological advance to the next. And our culture and our kids do likewise. Ten years ago at the Rochester General Assembly, I remember making a stink about assuming everyone had the wherewithawl to own a computer and communicate electronically. Today, even people who consider themselves poor have cell phones, and the most modest households have a computer. Communication technology has become that significant. If these technologies have become so ubiquitous in the past decade, what will the next decade bring? Many of the current ideas around accelating change and collapsing singularities sound like science fiction AND - as I remember it - the science fiction of my childhood could not begin to envision the reality of my adult years.

Technology begats technology at a faster and faster pace, and if we are to serve our own, as well as our children's needs, we cannot take ten years to develop a comprehensive religious education program. We must continually evaluate and shift, rewrite, reprogram, seek out new resources, and acquire the tools kids need to deal with the moral, ethical and social demands of the new technolgies they (and we) continually encounter. At the same time, we can never lose sight of the religious grounding of our Unitarian Universalist beliefs. There is a timeless wisdom in our history, our practices and our theolgies of reason, inquiry, experience and inclusion. Striking a balance between the two is the work of faith development in the current millenium. I have often said and it bears repeating, that balance is momentary. Once we acquire it, something shifts and we must reach for balance again. Thats the cost of living in dynamic interesting, changing times. It's hard work and these days, it's some of the most important work the church can do. These words from Alfred North Whitehead put it succiently, The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order. Let our work be that art.