I have a theory about why things feel like they are moving faster now than ever before.
Before COVID, change happened at a pretty consistent rate in most areas of life.
After COVID, the rate of change feels like it has increased exponentially. Things that would have taken 10 years to develop are developing in a year or two. These are not precise numbers, just giving you the concept.
Why has the rate of change increased?
It increased because the COVID years required us to make rapid big decisions. Big decisions normally take time to develop but when you make multiple, rapid, big decisions the rate of change will go up faster because you are making changes at a faster rate.
An expert marketer named Alen Sultanic says we move at the rate of our decisions. If you want to move faster in life, make decisions faster. And that is what has happened.
So if you are feeling like the world is moving by faster than it was before and that so much has changed in the last 4 years and it is only speeding up, I think this was the start of it all.
And that has led to some hard things and some wonderful things.
Churches don’t often make big changes quickly. But we had to during COVID. Decisions that would have set on the drawing board for years all of a sudden were viable considerations in order to stay afloat.
People stopped going to church and many never returned. They were forced to make decisions that they had never had to make before…when in our lifetime were we told to not “go to church” for the safety of everyone? I am not getting into the validity of that situation so much as using it to illustrate my point – we all had to make decisions and we made them and this resulted in a great number of churches shrinking and closing their doors.
This also got us asking BIG questions that we never had asked ourselves before about the nature of church and if church in a home is still a church (which it is). So many people continued meeting at home and never “went back” to the traditional model.
Lots of new things were born out of this situation that happened at a lightning pace and I think many of these things were good for the Kingdom. I am excited to see what God has in store for us next!
2 Responses
Matt, I truly believe that Christ is currently rebuilding His Church in a way that will prepare His people for the final days of this age. The traditional (institutional) structure of the Church that’s been in place since the early fourth century is not up to the task at hand, proclaiming the testimony of Christ to all the nations prior to His second advent. I don’t have a vision of what the Church will look like, but I know that changes are coming.
I think that is entirely possible and I am hopeful about it! This would have taken 100 years to shift in the old (pre-COVID) system.