When I was a child, we called it a merry-go-round. In truth, it was more of a human-sized, 'Lazy Susan' than an amusement park ride.
The playground equipment that I remember from my elementary school was a metal disk, which was literally a turntable. By grabbing one of its handlebars and running in the deep rut alongside it, my classmates and I would run ourselves silly until the world blurred around us.
The merry-go-round was a death-trap.
But we delighted in the disorienting speed that we could generate. We giggled with glee when our friends were thrown when their grip slipped. The vertigo-inducing rotations resulted in a delicious disorientation.
Today, that kind of sensation is par for the course. One look at the headlines, or our calendars and our email inboxes and we lose our balance. Everything that we once thought was stable and upright now bends to the horizons and elicits carnival ride-like queasiness.
As much as we've tried to get off this merry-go-round, the turntable's continued spinning won't let us. And while I've been tempted to squeeze my eyes shut and disengage until the pandemic relents, my faith in Jesus reminds me that I am called to be engaged and present even when the earth moves beneath my feet.
I do believe that the merry-go-round will one day stop spinning. But when it does, our world may be unrecognizable. Understandably, this feels like a threat. But it may just be an opportunity for something new to be born. I'll say more.
But first, it may be helpful to remember what we've done since the world started spinning. In the early days of the pandemic, worship became an online-only event. When the schools closed, our 1st Explorers Ministry went dormant. Although our church programming followed suit, our offices remained open, and we set sail on the breeze of robust internet connectivity. Our WMU created ways for our children to stay on mission. Pictures of our church's children participating in a Palm Sunday activity showed up on Facebook. Zoom meetings replaced our Wednesday night gatherings. The church wrote letters to one another. We traded text messages. We continued to give to our ministry, and we found new ways to care for one another.
The crisis deepened, of course, and worship moved to our front porch. We were optimistic that the virus would wane in the summer months, but that proved to be a fool's hope as things got worse as the sun got higher. Still, we knew how important our ministry to children and families would be—especially with the dizziness we were feeling—so we moved forward with our Summer Explorers Camp. At Pentecost, worship
returned to the sanctuary, but our in-person attendance has been a fraction of what it was before the pandemic. Our outdoor, church-wide gatherings have allowed us to be together, but we've been distracted by the faces that we do not see. Fall is now approaching, and the school system is understandably wary. As a result, our 1st Explorers has raced to fill the gap and intends to provide a comprehensive plan to minister to families who are desperate for care and continuity.
Although surreal, we know how we got to early August. But what happens next is blurred by uncertainty.
"Surely the merry-go-round will run out of steam," we think. "How much more disorientation can we expect? When will the world stop spinning?"
The one certainty that we have is our questions:
What next?
What will our church look like this fall?
What will our church look like when the merry-go-round stops spinning?
Will we restart the church's offerings to what they were like before? But then before what? Before 1990? Before 9/11? Before The Pandemic?
Maybe we'll choose to renew those old models of ministry with a few, timely adaptations?
Or, will we dare to relaunch our ministry in a world that has yet to come into focus?
So many questions. I know, I'm bewildered by them, too. But I'm choosing to risk transparency because the moment is more significant than even you and I may imagine.
This may just be a once-in-a-millennium kind of moment.
As any student of history will tell you, the Church Universal these last 21 centuries has known countless expressions and has undergone several reformations. The truth of God's love to us in Christ Jesus has never changed, but how the Church has articulated this message and embodied it certainly has. Jesus's ministry and the early Church were Kingdom movements that inhaled and exhaled at different times. We shouldn't be surprised that we would experience this now, ourselves. The Gospel image that comes into focus is a farmer sowing seeds and tending to the soil…and yes, even pruning.
The questions remain, however. As such, I'd like you to hold these questions with me as we move deeper into the second half of 2020. In the coming weeks, I'd like to share what I've been reading and tell you what I've been thinking about and considering. I'd like to identify some teachable moments in Church history and highlight the times in scripture where the faithful were at a crossroads. Simply put, I'd like to share the process of discernment with you. Because I do believe that God is present with us, and I do have hope that this moment is pregnant with possibility. I have faith that God is birthing a new expression of the Body of Christ in our midst.
And speaking of being together, I'm reminded of that merry-go-round. As children, we were never much of a match for the centrifugal forces that pulled on us. Our hands,
sweaty from recess, would slip, and we'd fall off, hitting the ground in a dusty cloud. But, when we held on to one another--when someone would hold on to us—we always stood a better chance to remain on the spinning disk.
Come to think of it, holding on to one another while we spun was part of the fun.