I remember reading an article some time ago about oil and the future of the petroleum industry that reminded me of a conversation with a friend many years previous:
“You know the Fischer company, the ‘bodies by Fischer’ of the Cadillacs?.” he said, “Well, they used to be a carriage company. When ‘horseless carriages’ started to become popular, the Fischer company decided that their business wasn’t just carriages but transportation.
“They responded to change and development by ‘thinking outside the box’, and they not only survived but grew.”
Many small and big oil companies have been doing the same. They’ve been accurately reading the signs of the times and rethinking their business model, their “mission”, if you will.
The article explained that they were not only embracing new technologies like fracking but also totally different businesses like wind turbines. To use my friend’s example, they also were thinking outside the box, realizing that their business is not just “oil” but “energy”.
What about religious people and religious organizations? How many of them have been successfully reading the signs of the times and thinking outside the box?
It’s not easy to do, of course, since it involves letting go of secure, familiar, and once effective and fruitful things and risking embracing a relatively unknown, uncertain, and somewhat risky future.
There has been a lot of progress—and a lot of defeatism, too. For example, take “ecumenism”. During the last half century, most Catholics have moved away from “outside the Church there’s no salvation”.
In fact, one of the seismic shifts in the understanding of the church has been that the one church of Christ embraces all who are trying to live as disciples of Jesus.
Some of the aftershocks of this ecclesiologic earthquake have involved placing less emphasis on rites, rules, and regulations:
– For example, defining church membership less by the ritual of baptism and more by the life-time commitment to follow Jesus that the ritual presumes and celebrates.
– For example, esteeming faithfulness to that commitment less by regular Sunday Mass attendance, Friday abstinence, or observance of other church regulations and customs and more by fidelity to the teachings, all the teachings, of Jesus.
– For example, judging the validity of marriage less by the marriage ceremony having been conducted according to church law and more by the existence of the decision and commitment that the ceremony symbolizes and represents.
– For example, respecting persons with ministry in the church less for their having been ordained or authorized and more for their personal integrity, competence, and loving commitment to service.
Change isn’t always comfortable, probably frequently isn’t comfortable—don’t we often speak of “growing pains”? It’s painful because change—growth, maturation, development, evolution, whatever you want to call it—is challenging.
It doesn’t involve just thinking outside the box, it means getting out, climbing out, breaking out of the box. It means rethinking your identity, purpose, and mission.
It It means letting go of some things, even really good things, so that you can have others, even better.
A chick can’t live unless it cracks the egg!
6 September 2020