how to shift the vibes but badly
if you'll permit me to gaze upon mine own navel...
i'm weirdly sensitive to change (sometimes!). i dunno if everyone's like this but i think i like a lot of stuff for the vibes--it's some ill-defined feeling i'm not forced to reckon with.
until something changes. oops. time to check in on myself.
you know how measuring something in quantum mechanics collapses the wavefunction and/or generates an entirely new universe or whatever? it's like that.
i've been part of 4 (four!) churches that have moved locations and one that merged with another church. in each case the vibes shifted. there's more there too--the churches went from startup mode to property owner mode and became about the building which i understand when everyone's excited about this new thing.
i used to attend a church in the country for reasons i won't bore you with and they met at this little unairconditioned building owned by some motheaten presbyterian org. it was frankly often horrible.
then they scraped together enough money to build a building down the road and in accordance with the ever-dutch sensibilities of the congregants it was barely a barn. it felt like meeting in a shrunk-down aircraft hangar. the vibes were immediately off.
now this of course wasn't the only thing. and i'm not saying being this sensitive and being willing to bounce over window dressings isn't a personal failure.
what i'm saying is that you can't simply change something foundational about something and not expect folks to respond to that. (i am folks in this case.)
i think a lot of people--leaders especially--think of churches and whatnot as these abstract organizational things that aren't expressed in their particulars and i want you to know you're wrong. where you meet; who attends; who leads; what kind of chairs you have; etc: these all matter. they're all part of the instantiation of the abstraction if such a thing can even be said to exist at all.