I feel like all I’m doing is fighting at times.
Fighting to change things in the youth on the district level.
Fighting to be heard on things that can be changed in the ordination process.

I don’t like feeling like this, and I’m thinking, I should just let it go.

What I’ve been noticing is how so many of us are so resistant to change. We lean on things and methods that worked in the past and hope that they will still work today.
When I attend some churches, I feel like I just walked through a time portal to the distant past.

What I began to then think about is how do the pastors become so afraid of change or trying to do things in a new way.
And I fear that one day, I’ll be the 55 year old pastor and telling the new 28 year old pastor that “we have never done things that way. It won’t work.”

So how does one fight the natural tendencies of becoming rigid and stuck in a way of doing things?

I think one thing that I should start practicing is just hearing the opinions and thoughts of others. And not the listening with one ear type of hearing, or listening so that I can find a critique to what they’re saying, but just sitting down and earnestly hearing their thoughts and ideas.
And at times, this has become unbearable (like having a soft pellet gun fight using the sanctuary as one base and the fellowship as the other team’s base and the kitchen, courtyard serve as the main battle grounds.) And other times, it’s teaching me to expand and move in a different direction (like moving the contemporary worship from Sunday to Saturday, which I wasn’t completely comfortable with in the beginning, but now I love that it’s on Saturday.)

A lot of times, I feel like my voice and the voices of my peers get lost in the way things have been done over the past few decades. And I think it’s a natural path in life that everyone takes: get set in a routine or a certain way of doing things. Everyone is afraid of change. But the hard thing is to not let that fear keep us from being set in stone.