500th Anniversary of the Reformation

The Reformer is always right about what’s wrong.
However, he’s often wrong about what is right.

– G.K. Chesterton

When you really think about it, this is a pretty exciting time to be in the church.  2000 years ago, Jesus walked the earth, and showed us how God relates to us in a new way.

500 years ago, Luther instigated a movement that helped the church move in a direction that Luther believed more accurately represented God and how God relates to God’s children. In the 1500 years between Jesus and Luther, there were many of these moments of shifting and learning, and now 500 years after Luther, we continue to experience this same need for reform and renewal.

The words of G.K. Chesterton above really made me think. I can easily pinpoint many things that the church at large, and things at the congregational level that we could do much better. I can see ways in which we fail to serve our neighbours, ways that we continue to be turned inward, ways that demonstrate poor stewardship. At the same time, I think there are some things that we do right… and this quote has me wondering if I think they are right because I am comfortable with them or if they really are right. Do I feel like we do something right just because I’m afraid of what it would look like to do it differently?

Here’s the problem: we cannot afford to be comfortable. We cannot afford to want to keep things the way they are because the world needs to hear our message and we aren’t effectively sharing it right now. The world needs to hear the gospel from our lips and the world needs to see us actually doing the work of taking care of each other and we are not doing everything we can to make sure those things happen.

The church of 2017 looks nothing like the church of the early Jesus followers. The church has done nothing but change and reform throughout its whole history; unfortunately for us, our own memories are much shorter than that and only tend to remember back far enough that the church looks very similar to our memories. So what does it mean for us to mark an anniversary that says we have are a church ‘church reformed – always reforming’ and have been for 500 years?  What might marking this anniversary call us to do? Give thanks, to be sure. But what else? It seems to me that we might find our own conviction to adapt to the needs of the changing world strengthened…

George Gillespie (1613-1648) said “reformation ends not in contemplation, but in action.” So let us not mark this anniversary with celebrations or by patting ourselves on our backs. Instead, may it be a motivator to continue the work of reformation – which is action.

Learning and growing together, with Christ,

Pastor Joanna +