Change is Good! Change is Bad!

Before I taught in Kuwait, I was a music teacher and band director at a secondary school in Pennsylvania. It was my first teaching job, and it was right after I finished university. Needless to say, I was totally full of idealism and empty on practical experience. I thought that I was going to turn that music program into something amazing overnight. I couldn't have been more wrong. While many of the mistakes were made by me, one of the major issues that I kept having to deal with was the concept of change. I had several parents that were part of the band booster club who were in the band when they were young and also had children who were in the band. They fiercely resisted any change because they remembered when they were in band, and they didn't want their memories or their children's experiences to be tarnished by changing the way it has 'historically been done.' I even had students resist me just because I had a different personality than the previous music director. It was a difficult three years, and one of the main things I learned is that change is hard.

However, I think the difficulty and level of resistance to change is in proportion to the amount of control or influence you have over the change, or if you have a good understanding of the change. I certainly didn't resist the changes I was making to my program as a music teacher, nor did the people who were were involved in the decision making process. Perhaps I could have handled the changes I made better if I included more people in the process.


The same is true for ministry. I mentioned in a previous post that the Lighthouse Jabriya started a new life group. This was because the previous group was getting too large to sustain all the members. However, I met some significant resistance from some people within the group, having to handle the situation carefully. Even though the reasons behind the change were explained, and people were given the options to choose the group they wanted to commit to (keeping in mind a large group gathering once a month or so), people still have had a hard time transitioning. Again, the people who accepted it the most either didn't have a long history with the group or they had some influence over the split. Those people who saw the benefits of intimacy in having two smaller groups accepted and even welcomed the change.

Our church is going through another major change right now, which is that we are changing the location of our Jabriya church service. As I've said before, we need to leave our location in Jabriya by the end of December because the main church at our location is adding another service at our time. By God's Providence, our church has found another villa in the neighboring district of Mishref.

I am personally excited about this change. I think I am looking forward to this change because I can clearly understand the reason behind the change and see the vision for all the benefits of this change. I know that we can't stay at Jabriya. There are several benefits of moving to this new location. We will most likely have the freedom to make the sanctuary and other rooms look/feel how we want. We will have a reception area after the service where people can connect better. The church can conduct leadership trainings, worship team practice, Christian education and life groups throughout the week. Our service will be able to grow more and it will be incentive to invite more people to church. Because I can see the vision of what it will become, I am excited about the change.

Of course, there will be difficulties. The new building needs renovating and cleaning before we can move in and make it our own. This place is more expensive than our last place and our members will need to give more sacrificially. There will be new issues with transportation and having people locate where it is. There will be opinions and disagreements in the decision making process, so there will be some "dying to self." There will be unexpected difficulties that haven't come up yet that we will need to deal with.

Even so, I am looking forward to this change because I get to be a part of what it will become and I can see the vision for it. It will be difficult for many people in the church and there will be a lot of hiccups. I think one of the solutions is to get as many people to understand the vision as possible and allow them to be a large part of what happens at our new location.

We ultimately need to lean on God, because He is truly the one that never changes. For our lives and our churches, change is absolutely necessary, but we can look to the One who doesn't change and trust that He knows what's best for us.