Y Safle

I don’t suppose it is a universal truth, but as a guiding principle I think there is something to be said for the thesis that crisis is required to bring about genuine and radical change.

Why should this be the case?

Well very often when we are involved in an endeavor, we are involved with others and we develop a process that is comfortable. This builds up an internal pressure that sustains the process unless the external pressure to change is so great that it causes the process to collapse.

I think we can broadly apply this principle. In our churches we do things a certain way. I knew one church which had a youth group meeting. The oldest member of the youth group was in his forties, and the youngest was 23. The group had grown older together, and they had just gone on and on with their comfortable process - year in and year out, without thinking that maybe that group had outlived its purpose.

We can see the same in higher education, where lectures are still a major means of delivery, despite the fact that they are the type of delivery students claim to least enjoy, and from which students may gain the least benefit (unless delivered in some manner that broadens the educational offering beyond a simple discourse by someone in front of a very large class).

We can see the same in politics, where we are caged in the same tired old systems, choosing between two sides of a Janus faced political elite. (For some reason I always think of lizards when I write political elite… Douglas Adams has a lot to answer for!)

We can see it in our personal lives perhaps. Certainly in my own, the times when I have made the most radical changes in my ideas, beliefs, attitudes and such like have been in the response to crisis. Something that caused me to set aside beliefs held because they were comfortable, and made me come face to face with issues I had previously ignored.

In particular, many years ago I held to some beliefs - and most notably the belief that I knew better than the vast majority of Christians on certain things - because I was encouraged to think that way by someone. The crisis that caused me to realise that this person’s own faith was defective caused me to take a long hard look at my own.

It is only when the external pressure is great enough to overcome the internal pressure we have generated to remain the same that we are forced to change.

So what do we do? Manufacture crisis? Probably not the wisest of moves, but we can embrace it when it comes.

On a personal level, perhaps we should also attempt change daily, so as to avoid the need for crisis. If we could ensure our internal pressure to settle down, sit back and not change never built up, it would not take a crisis to change us.

And then there are those things over which we may feel we have little control. There is the Church service that hasn’t changed format since 1924, or the bible study which no one wants to go to, because two people always take it over to discuss single versus double predestination - and have done for the last 20 years.

There is the political system that will not change. The party that will not die, or the coalition that has run local politics for a quarter of the century. We cannot change these things, but a crisis - when it comes - will change them. And it will change them quickly.

The question is, what will we do when the crisis comes? Can we plausibly foresee a crisis, and know what we must do if we want to bring change for the better?

Robin Hobb wrote an excellent series of books about the “Farseers” based around a character known as “the catalyst”. This character either precipitated crisis, or else it followed him around in the magical manner of such stories. But in these stories it is the White Prophet who (with the benefit of knowledge of the future) uses the catalyst to jump the world from the rut it is in into a new rut, which brings about improvements for all.

We don’t have the benefit of knowledge of the future, but we can know now how we would see the world to be a better place (whether on the global scale or the very local scale). We can also predict some crises, simply because they are inevitable (eventually). If we put these together, we too could seize the opportunity of crisis when it comes, to see genuine change.