Last weekend, my husband received about six boxes of 45 records that his aunt left him and we spent some evenings last week going through them. It was a lot of fun, but we started thinking about all the changes that we have made through the years in the way that we get our music. I am now an owner of an iPod, and I love it. I can just carry this little credit card sized box around all the time and plug it in whereever I go. I have my entire catalog of music inside an external hard drive the size of a sandwich, and if I need to, I can just pop it into my purse.

When you think about it, how we got from records to iPods was a long process, but it happened in a relatively short period of time. After albums, it was eight tracks, then cassette tapes, then CD’s, and now we are well on our way to iPods and cell phones. It’s all about change.

When it comes to connecting with people, it requires change on our part. We have to change from being a “me” thinking person to being a “you” thinking person and that can be difficult to change. It doesn’t have to happen overnight, though. I think that what a lot of us have been saying for a long time is that we don’t need to make the changes all at once. They can be changes over time. Small changes, less drastic changes open us up in small ways and grow us up into the bigger changes. God’s a master at doing that with us.

In spite of the fact that I have been largely outside the organizational church most of my life, I have actually sat on a couple of evangelism teams in the last five years. I learned a lot from them. Oh, nothing about evangelism, but more about what not to do. I recall sitting in one particular group and they went around the committee and were lamenting about how they weren’t able to do anything.

“I talk to my neighbors, and I invite them to church, but they never come,” said one particularly sweet elderly lady, but she was still doing things the old way. She didn’t realize that her sweet disposition and loving and caring kindness were better than any invite to church. She probably didn’t realize that bringing more people to church wasn’t the objective. The objective is loving people as Christ loved us.

The big change for this generation is that they can’t figure any reason to go to church. Several years ago, when a couple we know left their church after twenty-two years due to some improprieties with finances by their pastor, I invited them to someone else’s church. My husband and I go to different churches all the time and so I have almost become a matchmaker of sorts in regard to churches. I recommended this church to them and they went for a long time and loved it. Finally, one day I asked him if he planned to join this church.

“Why?” he asked me directly. I have to be honest when I say that I didn’t really have a good answer for that.

All this really illustrates to me is that times are changing, and we have to make the change along with them. We have to be better Christians, more understanding, and more congnizant of why God is important to us. We have to know ourselves and be able to share ourselves with others in a way that speaks to them. We can’t continue to try to sell 45 records to an iPod generation.

The real disaster would be not to make any change at all and to be offended by the “world,” forming strong boundaries and insisting that they either conform to our ways or be damned. Instead, we have to be better listeners and understand that the central message of Christ hasn’t changed at all–only the way we speak of it. Antiques are no longer useful. We can look at them, understand them, and appreciate them for what they once were, but they aren’t relevant to us in the present. The things that last the test of time are the ideals that are the most central to our faith and always have been. “Faith, Hope, and Love–and the greatest of these is love.”