c. 2008 Religion News Service

LAKE GENEVA, Wis. _ A former Playboy Club in southeast Wisconsin might seem an odd venue for a church leadership retreat. But the provocatively clad “Playboy bunnies” are long gone, replaced by the normal mix of jeans-clad folks enjoying a weekend getaway.

Besides, as a venue for discerning God’s will, a resort for Chicago and Milwaukee pleasure-lovers is not much different than a Roman Pantheon rededicated to Mary, or a basketball arena turned into a megachurch, or an unassuming storefront turned into a Pentecostal assembly.

Neither God nor religion starts with a blank slate. Faith is conversion from something _ from a life of sin, from a state of not-knowing, from nagging questions or stubborn selfishness.

From the day God released the Hebrews from slavery to present-day liberations of trapped people, God takes what is and changes it for the better. Hatred becomes love, bigotry becomes tolerance, war becomes peace, greed becomes charity, fear becomes boldness.

Religion often enjoys looking backward, as if founding stories verified its right to rule. But the measure of faith is never what used to be, but where the pilgrim has arrived today. God is always doing a “new thing.” We learn from a contrast with the old, but the former thing itself offers little more than a glimpse of why God needed to keep us moving.

Such letting-go doesn’t come easily. The typical church leadership group spends considerable time managing money and facilities given by the long-dead. They wrestle with expectations still clutched and dreams long since overcome by reality.

That’s one reason why church leadership is such a draining assignment. Where’s the life in perpetuating an old way, polishing an old treasure or perfecting an old argument? The old has faded _ even the old that was enshrined and thought permanent. The world has moved on, the church’s context has moved on.

And, whether we want to believe it or not, God has moved on.

It’s fine that settlers from Geneva, N.Y., named a town in Wisconsin after their former home. It’s fine that railroads once brought wealthy Chicagoans here, that automobiles brought gangsters like Al Capone, and that fading fortunes made town leaders receptive to Hugh Hefner’s 1960 dream of building an empire on provocative display. But none of that educates today’s children or pays today’s bills.

I think church leadership would be more engaging, and church affairs more enlivening, if we could focus on two things: the “from” and the “new.”

From what bondage does God seek to free us? From what tired or self-destructive habit, from what blindness, from what unjust and unloving way does God seek to lead us on? The “from” is a place we must leave; standing still isn’t an option. It’s good to be honest about the “from,” but enshrining it merely worsens our captivity.

The “new” is what lies ahead _ in sight and yet beyond sight, here but not here, something in the process of happening. The “new” is a target that will become an arrival and then quickly, a “from.” It is delusional when we argue about the new as if we had some choice about allowing God to do it.

Church leadership is livelier and more engaging when it seeks to discern the new, to make room for it, to help others accept liberation, and to avoid making permanent what our faith history should teach us is merely one stage in a long journey onward.

(Tom Ehrich is a writer, church consultant and Episcopal priest based in New York. He is the author of “Just Wondering, Jesus,” and the founder of the Church Wellness Project, http://www.churchwellness.com. His Web site is http://www.morningwalkmedia.com.)

KRE/CM END EHRICH600 words

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