We've been riding this pendulum for two thousand years...

...and quite frankly I'm starting to get uncomfortable. Not just because sitting on a pendulum is not a terribly cozy position, but it is quite tiring swinging back and forth, back and forth with no sign of this painfully repetitive motion ever stopping.

What pendulum is this that I speak of, you ask? Why the pendulum of the Church, of course!

Perhaps more than any other institution in this world, the Christian Church is famous for swinging back and forth in the nature of the actions which it takes. This is not, of course, something owned by Christianity. We humans are wonderful at being indecisive. Combine this with our love of binaries (good vs evil, effective vs failure, pie vs cake), and we've established a joyous system in which when we see something going wrong we swing as fast as we can in the other direction, completely confident that if we do the opposite of the wrong thing we were doing we will undoubtedly find the solution to our woes.

For the Church, this process is particularly important, based on the fact that Christians get caught up in this about 137% more than other humans. I think the reason for this is that we have a whole other dimension to what we do here on this Earth. Not only are we trying not to hurt the people around us, stay alive, and keep things in our general vicinity from lighting on fire or getting eaten by bears, but we are also trying to please God. The last aspect of our lives is, bar none, the most important. It is also the most difficult to reconcile. Being that God's will can be hard to discern, it is even more tempting to begin running in the other direction when we see something going the slightest bit wrong, crying out the oh-so-spiritual justification of "It must not have been God's will!"

This over-eagerness to swing back and forth in terms of how we think we should interact with the world has done plenty of damage, with Christians finding fault on both sides of the arc and a hefty amount of division coming about as a result. Personally, I'm a bit tired of watching myself and those I call my brothers and sisters in Christ running back and forth, pulled by whoever happens to have the most convincing rhetoric in a particular moment.

But what to do? If the Church has been swinging back and forth since its birth as a body, is there any hope to stop this swinging and heal the rifts which the pendulum has ripped open? I honestly believe that there is. We, as a collective body, need to stop looking at the big shiny end that keeps swinging, and focus more on the pivot point that our faith has been resting on since the beginning. By refocusing on these foundational aspects of our faith, God's grace and the work which He did on the cross, we have the opportunity to begin the process of bringing His people together in a way that hasn't been seen since the time of Acts.

This isn't going to be an easy process. We have spent years becoming very, very good at arguing over small issues (for example, people spent a century fighting about what day Easter should be on). It has to begin on a small level, with each of us choosing to not allow relatively unimportant issues to separate what the Lord has joined together. In light of this, I want to invite each of you to join me in looking to the foundation of our faith, rather than the swinging pendulum of our own understanding. Personally, I'm excited to start living a life with less head swinging and more God following.

With His love and hopefully His grace,

Taylor