Parable of the chest of drawers

When we arrived in our new home in Manchester it was something of a chock. The house is wonderful, placed in a lovely and quiet are, but the inside! Someone in a mail described his recollection of the house as “you need sunglasses to protect you from all the different colour carpets” - and he only mentioned the carpets. Every room had a different colour and pattern carpet, every room had a different colour and pattern wall paper. And – how can I put it – the style (or rather styles) were not quite compatible with ours.

There was one room which was different though. It had been decorated, if not recently, then at least more recently than the rest. The wall paper was ... special, but I suppose it was OK - if you like shades of pink. But the real difference was, that instead of a dark carpet with a strange pattern, it was a parquet floor. It gave the room a modern feel, totally different from any other room in the house. It was like jumping 20 years ahead, if you compared ex. the dining room to this room.

One wall in the room is covered with a wardrobe from floor to ceiling. The other wall has shelves and 2 small cupboards hanging on the wall, in the same design as the wardrobe – quite smart thinking. And then there was a chest of drawers – again in the same design as the wardrobes, making everything looking as a whole. Again, it did give the room a modern feeling – someone had dragged this room out of the middle ages and moved it into a more contemporary setting.
We decided that room would be our combined guest room/office/reading room (we still live in the hope that some people actually will come and visit us!) and we started to arrange it mentally. We were off to IKEA more times than we care to think of, and looked at sofa beds, bookcases, curtain etc. for the room, but first we had to paint the room, as we did not really fancy the shades of pink.

We emptied the room of furniture, and went to move the chest – and behold, what did we realise? It was mounted on the wall, could not be moved and as we looked closer, we noticed for the first time it also was mounted on the floor. Strange, but we had tools, so we could dis-mount it, so no big problem.

As we began we had our next surprise. Last time the room had been decorated, the wallpaper had been but around the the chest of drawers. If we were going to move it, we would have to do some work on the wall, to make it look OK. We stopped, looked at each other and wondered whether it was worth it? Should we just leave it? No, of course not, we wanted to move it to make more space in the room. Out with the tools, ready to go and then we had our next surprise. Not only had the chest not been moved when the room was painted – it had not been moved when the parquet floor was laid! In other words, there was no parquet floor under the chest, just the old wooden planks (a number of thoughts about the British flew through our heads and a few over our lips!).

It basically meant we could do whatever we wanted in the room, just not move the chest of drawers, which really was in the way! The room had the appearance of being modern and relevant – but it was superficial, not carried through, and through the chest it was for ever prevented from any further change – locked into the past, because the changes had only been partly done, only giving an appearance of being contemporary and modern.

We left the chest where it was. We conceded to the decisions of the past and had to organise the whole room around a silly little chest of drawers, which we did not really need. As I thought about this I wondered if this is not what many churches do? They reluctantly accept they have to change, if they are to remain, or rather (for most churches) become relevant to the world around them and so they change the songbook for a projector and powerpoint, they change the music from Wesley to Redmann, they might even change the dress code from suits to polo shirts – but it is all superficial – there are still things which cannot be moved or changed – they give the impression of being contemporary – but what they have is “contemporary irrelevance”.

Is it really the projector, the music, the clothes that makes us relevant? Or is it the presence and power of God? Do we waste a lot of energy on going through change processes with what really are superficial things in a vain attempt of becoming relevant to people outside the church, without paying the price of real change – a search for the presence of God to be manifested in our midst. Do we really think that if people come into our churches, and they look around and exclaim “Wow, you are so contemporary” that it will meet their needs or make them want to come back?

Do we decorate round the chest of drawers and fall into the trap of “contemporary irrelevance”?
What would happen if we first sought God and his presence – if God manifested his presence among us and worked in power and then, as the Spirit led us, to make it easier to communicate with people of this age?

Is it a question of either/or or is it maybe a question of both/and?

Have a nice weekend – may we all experience the presence and power of God as we gather to worship tomorrow – and if we do not, may we search for it – not settling for outer change, but having the attitude of Jacob “I will not let you go before you bless me!”