Dear Friends,

           I love reading bumper stickers! Mind you, I don’t agree with at least half of them and believe, too, that sometimes they’re way too simplistic, but I love to read them. Ann Arbor and environs is a great area for a bumper sticker reader like me, too. When Jane Pollock, the Administrative Assistant for this office was in Chicago earlier this summer, she recalled one for me that is now my new favorite bumper sticker: “Change Is Good. You Go First.”  If ever there was a bumper sticker for our day, friends, this one would, I suggest, have to be on most people’s “short lists”.

              “Change Is Good. You Go First” is also amazingly applicable for we who seek to be leaders in the Church early in the 21st century, too. Change is all around us, coming to us at an ever-increasingly frenetic pace and more often than I wish, we in the church are still dealing with yesterday’s issues and bygone concerns. Added to our dis-ease with change is the all-too-real fear of making wrong choices. It is difficult to obtain good data, to rehearse possibilities and explore options, then  gain consensus before the next option comes at our collective decision-making process, all before we’ve even processed the implications for our first decision.  Whew! No wonder we in the Church (and elsewhere in our lives) feel overwhelmed.

            “Change Is Good. You Go First” also addresses another facet of our common life together in the Body of Christ. It’s our sense that “they” are the ones who need to change, that “the other” is the one (or ones) who should be compelled to alter their way of doing things… “they” should be the first to try something untested or uncertain… “they” should be the ones to take the risk and if it works out okay, then we can follow and enjoy the fruits of their efforts, energy and risk-taking.

            What about you?  Where are you on the change-embracing and change-aversion continuum?  When you hear the word “change” do you get nervous… excited… anxious?
Do you see it as an interruption to your life… maybe even a threat… or do you sense that perhaps God might be inviting us into something that will be life-transforming, faith-renewing, cosmically invigorating? Or does it depend? And on what?  What does our reaction to “change” say about our faith, both individually and collectively?  What might God want to be saying to us in all these changes that mark our life together in the Church in 2007?

            As always, I invite your responses and feedback. As we enter the season of fall and all that means in our lives and congregations, remember who you are and Whose you are as we move into God’s future.

Shalom,

Tom Macaulay
District Superintendent