Dear friends in Christ

I love to listen to podcasts. I love them because they help keep my mind occupied during my commutes to and from Red Wing. And I love them because the best ones help me grow in my apprenticeship to Jesus and my capacity to minister to others.

My favorite podcast, the “Pivot Podcast”, comes from Luther Seminary’s Faith + Lead initiative. For quite a while now, Pivot has been exploring the changing landscape of the church and how we can faithfully live into the future that God is calling us into as congregations and as faithful apprentices to Jesus. And that’s something that’s near and dear to my heart, because there’s a wedge that’s been driven between the church and our culture, and we are needing to learn how to adapt in response.

“Change” is often a dirty word in the church, and especially in our denomination. In many ways, that’s understandable. Our faith connects us not just to God and to each other, but to our own past. There’s a comfort in knowing what to ex-pect, and the stability of our faith communities provides many of us with a sense of safety and security in a world that seems to be changing at an ever-faster rate.

And yet, churches are always changing – even if we don’t recognize it. Because churches are like any other living thing – we grow and change, or become stagnant and wither.

So the question really isn’t “will we change?” The question is whether we’ll take an active part in shaping that change. The question is whether our change will be a faithful response to God’s call to us to live out our baptismal promises.

Sometimes a change involves bringing in an expert to make tweaks to a system – almost like improving a manufacturing process. Add the right music, or make this change to worship, or start this particular Bible study or children’s program, and voom – off you go. But the change we – and nearly every other church – are facing isn’t like that. As one colleague recently said to me “it’s like we were built to be the Minnesota Vikings, and now all of a sudden we’re a ballet company”. The good news here is that we don’t have to work harder or create more things for us to do. We’re not called to make things look different. We’re simply called to discern together how God is calling us to be different.

So I hope you can come to our pancake breakfast at 11:00 on Sunday, October 27. I’ll be presenting some material and thoughts on how society around us has changed, what impact that’s having on communities of faith across the board, and how we might faithfully respond. But really, I’m looking forward to the conversations that will spark – both that day and in the days to come – about how we might be transformed by new ideas, new practices, and new ways of being.

In Christ, Pastor Aaron Twait