The problem of perpetuity

I spent last week at a conference on a beautiful college campus I’d never been to before. As I walked around, I saw a huge brick monument with fire coming out of a bowl on top. The monument was an “eternal flame” given by the alumni of a particular class. Inscribed onto the monument was the date of its construction and rebuild. I may be too much of a literalist, but I found delicious humor in the irony of something purporting to be eternal that simultaneously reported its founding and repair dates.

The claim of the monument reminded me of a run-in I had many years ago with a member of the church I served at the time. There was a religious painting hanging in a prominent spot — a hallway that got a lot of foot traffic throughout the week. The painting was pretty dated and, truth be known, ugly. I pondered the wisdom of taking it down. If you know anything about well-established churches, you know you are taking your life in your hands when you change anything inside the walls of the church for fear of offending someone.

As a pastor you sometimes bump into and stumble over things that are important to someone, and after a few scrapes you learn to pick your battles. I had walked by this painting for at least a couple of years, and I would think about replacing it with something a little more eye-catching.

One day I gathered my courage and took the painting down to put it into storage in the church basement. I hoped it wouldn’t be missed. It was. It didn’t take long for a certain someone to notice that the painting was not in its habitual space. He came and spoke to me, and he was visibly upset. He asked if I had taken the painting down. I told him that yes, I did. He wanted to know where the painting was. I told him that it was safely stored in the church basement.

“The church basement? You had no right to do that, pastor! That painting was given in perpetuity!” he said.

Turned out that the donor he named was one of the founding members of the church, someone he was good friends with when he was alive. The person had passed away a couple of decades before. I took a deep breath, and probably in a non-pastoral way said this: “Nothing is in perpetuity. You are not in perpetuity. I am not in perpetuity. And that painting sure as heck is not in perpetuity!”

After going several rounds with him, I told him that I would put the painting back up if enough people said they wanted it up. In the meantime, I was going to put something a little more friendly to visitors up in that prominent place. In the coming weeks, I kept my ears open to find out if the painting was important to anyone else. No one else showed up in my office to complain. In fact, if I heard anything at all about the painting, it was the comment that it was about time that someone took “that horrid painting down.”

Churches can get stuck in keeping things the same way. I’m not talking about matters of basic doctrine, like Jesus being raised from the dead on the third day. There are certainly beliefs that are foundational for what it means to be a Christian. No, I’m talking about eternal flames, or pictures on walls, or who is sitting in my pew (don’t they know I always sit there?). In a world where things are constantly changing, there is comfort in keeping things the same way when it comes to church. Things that are unimportant or even limiting in a church’s ability to reach others with the gospel message take on a sheen of perpetuity, never to be changed, always kept the same, and after a while are part of the ignored mental furniture making up the overall ambience.

Perpetuity, or the illusion thereof, can border on idolatry. I’ve seen churches that haven’t made a new disciple of Jesus Christ for years but have kept everything exactly the same nevertheless, doing the same things over and over, getting the same results. Why do churches and pastors do this? It’s the path of least resistance in the short term. Better to not make someone mad than to change something that has always been there or do something new. The long-term effect can be a killer for a local church that ceases to reach its community around it in new ways. The atmosphere remains predictable but stale, smothering new initiatives and practices that hold the promise of taking a church out of a dry season of ineffectiveness.

I love God’s announcement to his people in Isaiah 43:18-19: “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.”

There are good things worth hanging on to, but those are the things of central importance that should never be abandoned. Confusion comes in where something has been good over a long period of time but has had its day. In these secondary matters, churches would be wise to hold them lightly and give them up when the time comes, allowing God to channel them into new and fresh ways as he renews his people with creativity and wonder.

I would not want to be the university president who decided to take down the eternal flame once and for all to re-purpose that space. Even so, I’d rather do that than settle for the stale out of deference to the illusion of perpetuity. When God is calling me to something new, vibrant and life-giving, I want to be obedient to him. If that is upsetting to someone, then I guess I am up for the challenge.

Derek Russell is pastor of the Hillsboro Global Methodist Church. He loves Jesus, family, dogs and football.