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All Change?

There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven.’ (Ecclesiastes 3:1)

We live in an ever-changing world.  We don’t have to look back too far in history to find the generation who would not have heard of every day words such as ‘Google’, ‘iPad’, ‘Wi-Fi’, ‘TikTok’, ‘influencers’ – the list goes on and on.  The late 20^th and early 21^st centuries have been a time of huge change in our working and leisure time.  One of my favourite types of TV programs is when families are taken back through different eras of the last century, each looking at different aspects of the social history from family life and work to leisure and consumerism.  But change can be disconcerting, disconnecting and immensely upsetting. How many of us have found ourselves utter that phase, “Well, isn’t wasn’t like that when I was young!”

We cannot deny that change is always around us. Within our churches, life changes, buildings change, people change. Within the EBA, we are often seeing ministers who have been a part of us for many years leave the area after being called to new ministries and we welcome new ones to churches who have faced pastoral vacancy. As a regional team, we are now entering a season of adjustment as once again the team changes with Graeme taking up his new ministry in Trowbridge (his last working day is 10^th October) and then David’s arrival at the beginning of November as RMTL (Amazing to think that Gale and I will then be the longest serving RMs!).

We look forward to what God has instore for us all and yet, for some of us, change feels disconcerting, disconnecting and upsetting – what we know has begun to change beyond recognition from what it was before.  And yet, change can also be a time of growth, of hope and of new beginnings.  Change is sadly inevitable but our reaction to it doesn’t need to be.  I strongly believe that our response to change needs to be bound up in the truth that no matter what changes around us, we believe in a God who ‘is the same yesterday, today and forever’ (Hebrews 13:8).