Fixing the Floor

When we lived in Michigan, we lived just north of the city of Detroit. We read in our church bulletin one Sunday that a mother about four miles to the south of us needed a crib for her new baby. Our son had just outgrown our crib, so we decided that we could give it away. We took it apart and I drove down to 5-mile road to deliver the crib. As I approached the house, I noticed that the stairs were in need of repair and had to choose carefully how I walked up to the door. The porch was the same. As I entered the house, meeting the owner who was a wonderful woman, dedicated to her family and very loving, I noticed the floor had holes and loose boards all over the place. She directed me to follow her to where she wanted the crib. I followed her every step, knowing that if I ventured off the path, I'd be through the floor in no time. But she had learned how to walk among the loose boards and nail pops and holes in order to get from point A to point B, in her own home. She was unable to fix the floor, so she normalized the damage and navigated accordingly.

Our church has learned to navigate a broken floor. We struggle with Christians who are inactive and unresponsive to the needs of the community and even of their own house. How have they become inactive? They didn't used to be. In fact, they came to the church very excited, eager and willing to be part of the community. But once they were in the house, they discovered that no one was moving. Why aren't they moving? Because the floor is broken and if you move, you might fall through. There are some who are moving, but they are moving very carefully, deliberately and slowly. You have to be that way because the floor is not safe.

How did the house fall into disrepair? I'm not sure. I have my guesses and maybe historically, there are a lot of reasons, but honestly, that's not important. The important thing is to consider whether you want to teach people how to walk on a broken floor or do you want to fix the floor? Which is going to be more work? In the short term it might be easier to teach people where to step, but that limits movement because you can't have everyone moving at the same time. It also limits creativity and the path that is prescribed by safety is the only way to go. If you go outside that path, you run the risk of injury. This path is marked by words like: we don't do things like that here, if you want to get things done you have to do it this way, it's just not a sure thing, so we probably shouldn't do anything, someone tried to do that before and got hurt. Have you heard these things? So the short term solution is limiting, prescribed and boring.

We need to fix the floor. We need to create a place for exploration, creativity, excitement, movement. How do we go about creating or re-creating an environment where God's gifts can be given the freedom and energy they need in order to accomplish his work with joy and excitement?