The Creative Activity of the Spirit

God is With the Future

Why do we fear change? As persons, institutions, clubs, schools—we generally don’t like it and resist it at all cost. Churches particularly hate to change it up, and as a result, stay locked into their past traditions—long, long, long after their best due date passes! It doesn’t really make sense. All of us change. And all of the time—at least on a physical level. However, on a group level even the smallest change stirs us up like a dislodged hornet’s nest.

So in this season of Pentecost what can we learn about change?

One:

The Spirit of God comes to breathe new life into our moribund souls and does so in an ongoing manner even as the waves break endlessly on the seashore. This means leaving some things in the past which are no longer needed and indeed hinder our path forward.

Two:

The future is a gift from God and we can face it with optimism because of the enlivening presence of God’s newness. As a result we don’t need to long for the old days but live with an open heart in the present and the Spirit’s amazing gifts will be revealed.

The spiritual writer Evelyn Underhill keenly penetrates how the old ways require constant refreshing even as a farmer’s field needs to be turned over for the soil to be ready for spring seeding. Listen for her sharp insights as to what is needed for a dynamic present/future state of being:

The coming of the Kingdom is perpetual. Again and again freshness, novelty, power from beyond the world, break in by unexpected paths, bringing unexpected change.

Those who cling to tradition and fear all novelty in God’s relationship with His world deny the creative activity of the Holy Spirit, and forget that what is now tradition was once innovation: that the real Christian is always a revolutionary, belongs to a new race and has been given a new name and a new song. God is with the future. (Evelyn Underhill)

Furthermore Underhill highlights the importance for the Church to be open to change and not to be stuck in the past:

In the church, too, this process of renovation from within, this fresh invasion of Reality must constantly be repeated if she is to escape the ever-present danger of stagnation. She is not a static institution but the living Body of the living Christ—the nucleus of the Kingdom, in this world. Thus loyalty to her supernatural calling will mean adjustment to that changing world to which she brings the unchanging gifts. (Underhill)

As Yaconelli helpfully reminds us “The first step of becoming “unstuck” is to realize that we are “stuck”. Let’s wake-up and allow the Holy Spirit to move us. Let’s become “change-agents” so that innovation, transformation, and imagination continue to find joyful expression.