May 1, 2008

Flexibility

Flexibility is important in virtually every area of life. God gives an abundance of flexibility to us when we are young, and it certainly comes in handy. Watch little children as they play. They roll, tumble, fall down, and jump back up. If you were to translate those same movements into the body of a 50-year-old, it would probably mean a few days in the hospital. Children are able to do those kinds of things because they are flexible.

On the mission field, flexibility is essential. Anyone who has ever been on a mission trip knows that from beginning to end, flexibility is important. If everything you do has to be neatly packaged, running on time, understood by everybody, finished, and put away at a precise moment, you probably will not do well on a mission trip. The people, the programs, or the process that will get you to and from the work will not meet all of your expectations. You have to be flexible and do what needs to be done as best you can with the resources you have.

I remember a few years ago a mission team that traveled thousands of miles with the anticipation of literally building a church facility where they were going. On arrival they found that the material had not come and would not be there while they were there. Some of the manpower that was supposed to be there to help would not be coming. The preparation for the building had not been made, and it became clear rather quickly that what they came to do was not going to happen. So what were they going to do with the 10 days they had allocated to build this new church facility? The only things they had they could use were shovels, and so they started manually, physically digging the footings of the foundation. All day every day they showed up and dug ditches along with some people from the church and community. Hour after hour, they did manual labor alongside the men from the community. Day after day the bond of friendship, care, and love became stronger and stronger. At the end of the mission trip, all of the men had come to understand that while they thought they were coming there to build a church building, God had actually sent them there to build relationships.

In church, flexibility is important. If you want to find flexibility referred to in the Bible, look and listen for words like patience, long-suffering, gentleness, and kindness. Each of those words has a certain aspect of limitation placed on your own will, your own demands, and some understanding and care for the needs of others. Why is it so important to be flexible in church? Two very significant reasons step forward, the first being that not one of us is at the same place. Every believer you know is in the growing process. Everyone you know is probably somewhere just ahead of you or just behind you, but very few are just exactly where you are.

The other reality is that each of us has some way and somewhere we can stretch a little further. We may not want to, but we may need to. I am not speaking of flexibility concerning truth and doctrine, as though we should be constantly changing or being blown by every wind of doctrine. By contrast I am talking about that truth transforming us so that we might be in a continual process of becoming like Jesus.

While flexibility is important, a person, church, or organization can become inflexible. It is usually a sign that something bad is taking place. Just think about changing something in church and see how flexible you are. Has your church ever struggled with changing its time of meeting, its constitution, or its music? It is pretty amazing to see how people act. Listen to what they say, and it usually reveals that there is far more concern about the structures than about the substance of what takes place inside.

Have you ever bought tickets to a football game, another sporting event, or some other special event and on the ticket for the time it said, “TBA?” It could be a football game where 50-75 thousand people are going to gather and the time is to be announced. Still everyone finds out the time, travels many miles, gets there, and gets to their seats regardless of the weather because they feel the event for which they are gathering is really important. I fully understand the need for structure in our lives and for the need people have to know when and where, so that they can plan the rest of their lives, but our inflexibility may reveal how unimportant we feel some of the things of God are.

I remember one time the church where I was pastor needed to enlarge the parking lot. We just did not have enough parking spaces for all of the people who came to the services, so the church made plans and voted to enlarge the parking space. Though the plans were carefully drawn and there were some trees that would be kept in the green spaces, there were some other trees that would have to be cut down. Protestors came to express their outrage that the trees were being cut. Although they were not members of our church, they were terribly upset. I visited with one of the men who seemed to be the leader. He said that he was a Christian, and he could not believe that Christians were doing such a terrible thing. I told him how we had tried to keep some of the trees while expanding the parking lot. That did not matter to him. He said, “Do you know how many years it took for these trees to grow and be this size?” I said, “Well, I am sure quite a while.” Then I asked him, “Have you thought about how long a person would be in hell if an opportunity for them to come to know Jesus is not given?” He looked puzzled, and I said, “Suppose somebody comes and parks their car where this tree was, they come inside, hear the Gospel, and accept Christ?” He just shook his head and let me know that he would rather have the tree than to accept the possibilities that might be available for some soul. Sometimes our inflexibility causes us to hold on to our traditions, or even a tree, regardless of the difference that may be made.

Now let me just share a brief word about probability. Depending on how we deal with flexibility and inflexibility, the probability is that we will develop an image, an aura from our church that enables people to see who we are, how we think, and how receptive we might be to others. If people hear us express our outrage about a time change, some tune that is sung in the church, or the removal of some tree, they quickly come to understand that we probably would not be to open to welcoming them either.

All through the years I have run into those folks who just know and sometime express that if they were to show up at church it would just blow people’s minds. Their pasts, their lifestyles, their sins, and their problems have been so out of synch with church folks that they are convinced the people of the church would have nothing to do with them.

Sometimes they are wrong, but on other occasions, our lack of flexibility shows that they are right on.

Jim Futral
Executive Director-Treasurer
jfutral@mbcb.org
5-1-08