The Church Sign

For at least two years I have read a church sign which says, "Time Changes.  Jesus Does Not."  I have this thing about church signs.  The surest way to get people to ignore them is to never change them.  If this is their goal, the church down the road has accomplished it.  My problem is that I still read it.  Do I hope it might be changed?  Maybe, but after two years, I surely should let that hope die.  I have finally decided the church should at least add one more line to the sign which would read, "And Neither Does this Sign!"  

Though this church sign is likely to be the same when Jesus comes, everything else is changing.  Some of the change is harmful and some beneficial.  Some of it leads to a better world and some of it has within it the seeds of destruction.   History has shown us that the institutions of our society are slow to change and only change as a result of some kind of reaction that is revolutionary.  Institutions being threatened build their last bastions behind self-preservation.  The church as an institution seems to thrive in the world of "this is how we have always done it."  

It matters not if the church has been around several hundred years or just since yesterday.  The temptation is always to settle into a pattern of operation and to embrace a document of direction that makes change possible only by divine intervention of the Holy Spirit.  In too many places the church has lost that revolutionary spirit that became present on the Day of Pentecost.  The church in the book of Acts did not exist to fill its coffers, or to build shrines, but to share Jesus with the world.  The world does not need another political party, or another ism, but a church that is willing to shed the robes of the status quo for the revolutionary spirit of Jesus.