Jesus is Conservative . . . And Liberal
When Did Christianity Become Anti-Change?
There’s a difference between being a conservative and just being conservative, between being a liberal and just being liberal. The former in both cases refers to a concluded position while the latter refers to an approach to life. (I’ve met some very open-minded people who would say they’re “a conservative” and I’ve met some very inflexible people who call themselves “a liberal.”)
Regardless of our theological or political positions and whether they’d fall into a “liberal” or “conservative” box, Christians are supposed to be both conservative and liberal—because God is. God’s core nature never changes. But the way God engages over centuries and cultures changes radically. The metaphors and forms have changed as humans have gone from stone age, nomadic tribal cultures to agrarian and urban and global cultures. It’s no coincidence that the bible begins in a garden and ends in a city—responsive adaptivity is a fundamental part of God’s unchanging nature.
The congregation I lead is always in transition. Living beside a large university means people are always coming and going. And it also means that we’re at the front lines of cultural movements. It keeps us on our toes. No cruising here. The models that worked ten years ago are long forgotten. So we often feel wearied by the constant watching, learning and adapting.
But in my consultation work with more stable congregations I see that cruising isn’t always helpful. I watch congregations go through the painful work of disruption after generations of cruising. The crisis breaks relationships and communities as systems that were designed 60 years ago reveal their rigidity. It’s much more traumatic than the daily work of attending and making minor adjustments.
As human beings we seek balance, homeostasis, stability. And when we look across church history, we see an ongoing effort to avoid change. Church history is one story after another of institutionalization and decline then sudden crisis which brings creativity for a generation until those new ideas get institutionalized. How have we grown so out of touch with our ever-adaptive God? When did Christianity become anti-change?
Scripture reminds me that God is often the one who brings the disruption. So much of Jesus’ ministry was spent teaching people, stuck in old habits and institutions, to be unsurprised that their ancient, unchanging God was also fluid, adaptive, new. In Luke 5, Jesus says,
“No one tears a piece out of a new garment to patch an old one. Otherwise, they will have torn the new garment, and the patch from the new will not match the old.”
And Matthew 9 has it:
“No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment, for the patch will pull away from the garment, making the tear worse.”
As a seamstress, I know how to patch clothing with consideration for the compatibility of fibres. To stitch a new, more flexible fabric onto old fabric will only result in puckering and tearing. The old cannot go where the new can go. Jesus wants us to understand that there are different times for different things, teaching us to be open to the possibility that our God discerns these times and adapts to them, without feeling threatened.
So to keep up with this unchanging, always adapting God we’ll need the skill of knowing what changes and what doesn’t. We’ll need to know that our stability is found in the person we follow, not the particular form. It will require us to watch every day to see where God is leading us next. If we follow an unchanging God who is always creating new ways of expressing love to humans, we need to be both conservative—proclaiming what doesn’t change—and liberal—being unsurprised by what does.