This is an AI-generated transcript of a video from my old website. Soon I will tidy it up! In the meantime, forgive the terrible writing and punctuation. -Clara
I often get asked in settings where we’re talking about some of the most difficult things in the life of the church. We’re talking about really dysfunctional people, broken systems, churches almost needing to close or needing to close. We’re talking about bullies, abusers, and narcissists throughout the church system and the problems that we have, talking about abuses of power, talking about all the ways that the church could be better, should be better, isn’t better, some of the most difficult things that we as clergy and laity live through.
When I’m talking about those things honestly with groups, I often get asked, how do you still have so much hope? How do you persevere in believing in the church? And the honest truth is that my experience is that God sees all those things that are wrong with us as opportunities to invite us into transformation. That’s been my personal experience and that’s been my experience working in congregational development, helping congregations to be transformed, working with adaptive leadership, that that happens in a very practical way that God steps in and by the power of the Holy Spirit, once we start being ready to say yes and asking for transformation, God stands ready to invite us into it in really practical and concrete ways that quite profoundly transform our lives. Several years ago someone said to me, you know, you spend a lot of time noticing how the glass is half empty but what you’re noticing is how much space there is for the glass to be fuller and I love this image so much as a way to hold on to hope, keep us firm in the hope you have set before us that we and all your children shall be free.
That’s how the prayer, the alternate prayer for the end of communion goes in the Anglican prayer book here in Canada. Keep us firm in that hope and my prayer is that we can really start to see all the things that aren’t well with the church as places where we could ask God to get more involved and to really transform us, not so that they become papered over like they were before but in fact so that we can become something new, something that is a little bit closer and more faithful to the call that God has for us than where we’re at at the moment. That’s my prayer that we can see all the space in the church as places where the church could be fuller, fuller of life, fuller of vitality, fuller in service of the vocation that God still has for us.
God still calls us to something that we could be more faithful in pursuing that together as a church and figuring out what that is saying yes to God and being transformed as communities and as individuals.
