Pendulums
It was truly love at first sight. As soon as I set eyes on the beautifully crafted cabinetry of the grandfather clock (and noted the knock-down bargain price), I knew I had to make it mine. The deep-bass boom of the chime and reassuring ticktock of the 300-year-old timepiece calms my soul. The sound of it accompanied by the smell of blazing logs is surely a perfect Christmas combination, especially if it’s chestnuts roasting in that open fire. I’m enamoured with that clock. Whenever I’m tapping away at my keyboard, I am grateful for the sound of it. I am reminded that some things endure, and that not everything that is new is better because of its newness.
Keeping the clock to accurate time, however, has taken some work. Over time, I learnt how to make the tiniest adjustments to the pendulum, a little to the left, a hair to the right, until it was perfectly balanced, accurate to within seconds. Voilà.
Perfectly balanced is how I like to think of myself. In my opinions, my theology, my lifestyle, I try to be balanced. I’m not so sure about everyone else, but I’m centred. My conclusions have been honed and shaped over many years. I ponder them inside my head, listening to myself, and I tend to trust… me. But surely I’m fooling myself. We’re all pendulums and inaccurate ones at that. Our responses are usually in reaction to something, and however much we fool ourselves that we live in the epicentre of correctness, our humanity makes us unreliable. We hold in our hands a Bible that is trustworthy, but the hands that grip the book are not.
Unbalanced pendulums can wreak havoc in the Church. The soul seared by betrayal swings wildly into isolation, quickly growing a thick skin, determined to thwart hurt before it comes knocking. But the reaction might cause more pain than the original bruise. Some people, wearied by ardent prophets who insist that they know the mind of God, react by treating prophecy with contempt. I’ve done this. I know that God speaks through people – I am in ministry because of a calling confirmed by a reliable, remarkable prophetic voice. But there are some ‘prophets’ who erode my expectations rather than nurture them. In the early days of the 2020 Covid pandemic, some ‘prophets’ lined up to announce the reason for the viral scourge. ‘God did it,’ they said, ‘He wanted to get our attention.’ Others insisted that the global illness was the result of God’s judgment. Not only was I intrigued by the notion that when bad things happen, God is quickly named as the source, but I also wondered why some of the prophets didn’t foresee the coming plague and head us off with a warning. Thus I react, pendulum like.
Rightly angered by bullies thinly disguised as church leaders, there are those who veer into anarchy, insisting that God alone should lead, and thus reject people gifted with true leadership. God has always been in the business of raising up servant leaders, and we should not reject His strategy because there are some who sully calling with bullying or abuse. Others swing wildly out of church altogether, angrily insistent that all that singing, praying and small-grouping are the death-throes of a dying and outmoded institution. In so doing, they deny the truth that God has always had a people, not just persons. Discipleship is not a solo activity but is always about formation flying.
So how can we avoid the extreme pendulum swings?
First, we can start by facing the truth that we’re not endlessly and always right. That’s difficult because we spend our lives quietly formulating our opinions, rehearsing them to ourselves in that inward conversation called self-talk. We’re rather convincing, at least to our own ears and minds. But we are wrong sometimes.
Next, we can get around people who potentially disagree with us and give them permission to speak their mind. Birds of a doctrinal feather tend to flock together, and too often we cocoon ourselves in social circles with like-minded people who heartily endorse our views because we confirm the rightness of their views. We form a club but it’s one that can be collectively wrong because of our mutual backslapping.
Finally, we’d do well to learn to dialogue respectfully and disagree agreeably. When healthy disagreement descends into lobbing word grenades at each other via the internet, nobody wins. For many Christians, their weapon of choice is a labelling machine. Someone doesn’t agree with our cherished view, and we swiftly brand them ‘heretic’, ‘liberal’, ‘dangerous’ or just plain ‘wrong’. Let’s listen, be patient, see the person and step away from the labelling machine.
Meanwhile, upon hearing the beautiful on-the-hour chimes of my clock, I realise that my ancient timepiece is once again at odds with my more accurate smart watch. Yikes! It’s out by a whole three minutes. Perhaps another adjustment is called for. Perhaps it’s time for yet another adjustment in me.