A new thang

We live in an incredible time, don’t we? We live in a time where there is both hope and depression in the church. There is hope because we have acknowledged we no longer can do things the way we have always done them and expect to continue to, well, have church. There is depression, I fear, because we have figured out we can’t continue to do things the way we have done them and expect to continue to have OUR church.
That’s the problem,, the challenge.
Do we believe this? Do we feel this? Is this part of our being, part of our substance, part of our lives, part of our present, our reality, our future?
I fear that most people, if not most churches, don’t think they need (and I mean need, not want to) change. It simply is what it is.
Or, most probably, it isn’t.
It just isn’t.
So, what do we do, what do we change to greet change with substance, with newness, with the joy that God brings to every new thing.
In the prophet Isaiah’s writings, we read this: Behold, I am doing a new thing;
now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness
 and rivers in the desert.  The wild beasts will honor me, the jackals and the ostriches,
 for I give water in the wilderness, rivers in the desert, to give drink to my chosen people,
 the people whom I formed for myself  that they might declare my praise.”
That seems to be something only pertaining to the Jews, but the principal is not because the next verse declares, ““Yet you did not call upon me, O Jacob; but you have been weary of me, O Israel!”
God was going to do a new thing. He made the declaration. The persons for which the declaration was made did not hear, nor did they answer, and the scripture clearly says that is because they had grown weary of God.
I suspect, without benefit of studies or numbers, that the weariness many are feeling comes from our work in religion. Religion has captured me in ways I can’t understand, but part of what I have heard this week in the conference I am in is that we need to forgo the worry about our churches, about religion and about all that baggage we bring into the equation and we need rest from it.
Or as they say where I come from, they need to throw it out in the trash.
And let incarnational relationships become the way we do not only church but life.
Those relationships, we’ve been told and I certainly believe, rely first on a one-on-one with God, then a one-on-one with each other that leads both to better churches but better teams and better leaders and better lives with Jesus.
God is going to make a new thing.
The question is whether we are going to listen, then act.