Many church leaders are telling us that there isn’t going to be a return to “normal” any time soon, or ever. Even if your “good old days” were in 2019 (instead of 1955), the 2019 version of “church as usual” isn’t coming back.
Even churches which weren’t even slightly interested in experiencing revitalization are facing the prospect of needing just that. It’s like being tossed into a leadership role when it was the last thing that you wanted.
I had always thought of nostalgia as something warm and fuzzy and harmless, like the feelings I experienced watching “It’s A Wonderful Life” or driving past the houses I grew up in.
But Robert Dale’s wonderful little book, “To Dream Again” changed my mind. Nostalgia is derived from two Greek words, nostos (to return home) and algia (a painful condition). So it’s no wonder that the word sounds like a disease: Nostalgia can be a painful condition which causes people to fail to face the real world and take needed action.
Here are four ways nostalgia holds us back in churches which need fresh starts:
- Nostalgia remembers our church family as complete and whole.
I’ve been laughing at myself over this one. Lately I’ve been thinking about the hundreds of wonderful people who attended the church which my wife and I were part of for 17 years. Looking back, our perspective is skewed. In my rearview mirror, I see all those people worshipping, loving and laughing together.
But that’s not the way it was. Most of those dear folk “passed through” the congregation over 17 years. In truth, we never had more than a couple hundred of them in the church at any given time. My memory is sweet, but it’s a fantasy.
Here’s how this can be a problem in your congregation. People looking back remember the church as larger than it ever was. Current reality is no match for our delusions. As Elwood P. Dowd said, in the play (or movie) Harvey: “I struggled with reality for 30 years and finally won out over it.”
More problematic still is the notion that our church will be what we think it used to be when we get all those people back. Sometimes the new pastor is saddled with the impossible task of regathering scattered sheep, or – worse yet – regathering angry sheep who are never going to be cheerful members of the church in its present or future form.
The Chinese proverb says that “you can’t step into the same river twice” and the saying holds true for congregations as well. There simply was no ideal time when “all the members of the church family” were there.
- Nostalgia idealizes a perfect past.
If we really could go back, what year or month would we go back to? Would two people be able to agree on this?
If I try to go back to a near perfect time in my childhood, I’m hard pressed to say which year that should be. If I go back to, let’s say, my eighth birthday, all my grandparents were alive and my family had not yet experienced the turbulence of the 1960s.
But in reality, I was sick a lot, my sister and I fought like cats and dogs and I was bullied in my neighborhood. Fast forward a year and my first grandparent was gone as well as my first wife (we had enjoyed SummerAid at our wedding).
Everybody’s smiling in those family photos of course, but that doesn’t mean that we were having a great time. Even on a bad day we all smile for the cameras.
In our old church photos we’re all smiling too, but that doesn’t mean that we had a perfect congregation.
- Nostalgia promises a world without change.
Back to the photographs: No matter how long we keep them they don’t change.
But our lives were changing constantly, even back when those photos were taken. Within two years of that eighth birthday – pizza and Coke bottles on the table as usual – we had moved to a new town, my siblings and I had hit adolescence with a bang, we were all having a terrible time with the move and my father had a miserable new job!
Things changed more slowly back then, but they did change and the changes were as unstoppable and unsolicited as they are today.
- Nostalgia precludes adventure with inertia.
It’s easy to see this fault in others. The Jewish people wanted to return to the security of slavery in Egypt. The first believers didn’t go into “all the world” until they were scattered by persecution. First century Jewish Christians wanted to return to the certainty of the Law of Moses. My mother wanted to replace her old broken radio with an identical new one. My wife still likes clunky old land-line telephones. Most of us would rather be safe than sorry.
But God is always calling us to embrace change, risk and adventure, and sometimes He rocks our world with plagues, persecution, grace, transistors, smart phones, pandemics and much, much more.
In 2021, thousands of brave leaders – who will call God’s people to leave their nostalgia and embrace fresh starts – are needed now.
