Starting with Why

This pandemic we’re in the midst of has caused an extraordinary amount of change in an incredibly short amount of time. And I think it’s fair to say we’re all a bit curious about which changes this pandemic has brought about in society are permanent and which are temporary.

What will things look like six months from now? A year? Two years? Twenty? Will we be back to hugging each other regularly? Shaking hands? Will the massive shift to working from home lead to long term effects in the way workplaces are structured and companies are run? Will air travel ever return to the levels it was at before COVID-19? Will movie theaters and live theater and concerts and sporting events ever be anything like what they were before?

Keith Doornbos, a Christian Reformed pastor with the Center for Church Renewal, recently wrote an article in which he notes that the pandemic hasn’t changed history so much as it has accelerated history. Many of the changes we’re experiencing were already in the works before—they’ve just jumped ahead at warp speed rather than taking years or decades to develop. And changes like this are happening in the church just as much as in society.

He lists seven changes in the church that have been accelerated by COVID-19—changes the church would have needed to face sooner or later. COVID-19 just made it sooner rather than later.

The first acceleration he lists is that “Mission clarity is essential to survival.” He argues that churches that have only a modest passion or a vague sense of “why” will have difficulty navigating the road ahead.

This has been true for a while already, but it’s ever more critical in navigating the pandemic. I’m reminded of a TED talk that Paul Rozeboom keeps recommending to me entitled How Great Leaders Inspire Action by Simon Sinek. The talk has now become a book entitled Start with Why. The basic concept is that with whatever you do, whatever decisions you make, start by asking why? Why is it that you’re doing this? What’s the purpose? What’s the point?

With a church, it might look like this: Why is it that we exist? Why do we worship? Why do we seek to make disciples of Jesus? Why do we tell others about Jesus? The answers to those questions then fundamentally shape how you go about doing each of those things. They clarify the purpose of all that we do and highlight why these things are important.

One of the benefits and challenges of the pandemic for the church has been that it has forced us to rethink what church is. Is it gathering on Sunday morning? Well—that’s important and I look forward to being able to do that again, but worship is still happening and ministry is still taking place. Our lives are still being shaped spiritually and we’re learning new ways to serve God with our time and energy. We’re learning to trust in ways we haven’t needed to before and God is placing different people into our lives and different routines and different connections than we ever expected before. We’re still a community together even as we are physically distant. We still care for one another and encourage and support each other. We are still the church even as we’re not gathering together in person in a building on Sunday morning.

The simple and most basic answer to the question of Why? for a church is Jesus, of course. We are a church because of Jesus. We gather to worship because of what God has done for us in Jesus. We shape our lives together in community because of Jesus. We go out into the world to serve God—individually and together—because of Jesus.

Beyond that, we have a mission statement at Boston Square. It’s no less true now in the midst of a pandemic than it was before. We are a passionate community, experiencing spiritual transformation, for building the Kingdom of God. We’re experiencing community together differently now than we did when gathering was easy and small groups could meet without distancing. We’re being transformed in new and different ways now than we were before—learning to trust and to live out our faith day to day. We’re still building the Kingdom of God now even as some of the ways we used to go about this are no longer possible at the moment.

The elders met together in our backyard a few weeks ago and talked through some of this—how are we doing in these areas, even as our usual way of going about them has changed? What are we doing well? What might we improve? We agreed that even as there’s plenty of room for improvement, these core values of who we are at Boston Square and why we exist are still strong, even in the midst of all the changes we’ve been experiencing.

I was encouraged by the sense that we had not lost sight of the why. Because my sense is—and maybe I’m wrong—but my sense is that there are plenty of people in the broader church that have lost sight of the why when it comes to their faith and to their engagement with church in particular. My prayer is that we at Boston Square might never lose sight of the why. But how about you? Have you lost sight of the why?