sermon excerpts: "Call to Change"

This past week, I served as a chaplain for the first ever CanLead Forum, a national conference for people involved and interested in youth ministry. Aiden Enns (a keynote speaker) is one of the editors of Geez Magazine, an impassioned critic of our consumer society, an advocate for change and an honest voice of conscience. ... He longs for the world to change, knowing that it can only happen person-by-person.

It would seem that his lectures would fly directly in the face of the other keynote speaker, Dr. Andrew Root, whose theory that youth ministry focus should be on the relationship between people and not using that relationship to seek to change others. Andy asserted that we should not, and cannot, push youth to believe what we want them to believe, to use our connection with them as a means to influence. Rather, we journey alongside as a place-sharer – listening, experiencing, seeing the other person as who they really are.

Jesus of Nazareth happens to be travelling through Galilee and calls others to join him. And just like that, they do. So it’s not like he’s abusing his relationship with them, they’d just barely met. The disciples would find that he’s not asking them to do things they don’t want to, rather he invites them to choose for themselves. But he doesn’t manipulate them towards a desired outcome.

What compels someone to just drop everything and go? Maybe these four men were desperate for a change, sick and tired of the stink of fish and calloused hands. Maybe James and John were fighting with their Dad that day. But would they all throw away a life’s work of training, knowledge and capital on the mystical invitation to fish for people?

Yet, on their reckless abandonment, these people would form the community of care and support, of service and outreach that would become the church. This is the same church that cannot seem to make a decision without forming a committee to consider it, writing reports to describe it, and vetting it through Presbytery. It would be tempting to say that the wave of change that Christ represented as slowed to a trickle in our bureaucratic busy-making.

Yet firebrand Aiden Enns spoke very sensitively, and sensibly, of the difference between quick conversion and long conversion. A quick conversion is a split-second, overnight, in-the-moment decision usually facilitated by a dramatic event or charismatic person. ...

On the other hand, a long conversion is a more gradual, longer term, small-steps shift in behaviour or understanding that is more personally oriented. ... What is most important to remember is the fact that both approaches to change are equally valid and valuable.

So we don’t need to feel bad that things are moving as quickly as we’d like in our lives, in our families, in our churches. It is what it is and God is working in and through many ways and means. What both the CanLead conference keynote speakers ended saying was that we already are who have to be.

God sees us as we are, by the lakeshore in a boat, on a tractor blowing out snow, in a minivan chauffering kids, and accepts that we are good enough as we are to be disciples. Recognizing that truth and living that way is the next step. Come, for all of us are fishing for people, for purpose, for truth and faith.