Births, deaths, and necessary endings

Reverend Steve Jones of the Mission Community of Exmouth, Littleham and Lympstone (Image: Steve Jones)

Birth is an amazing experience. While I wasn’t aware of my own, I was present in every way for the birth of my daughter and my son.

It was an experience unlike anything that I have known before or since. In one moment, there was my wife, me, a midwife, and a doctor or two.

The next moment a completely new human being, with all their needs, hopes, fears, joys, and wonder, was right there in front of me.

No one like this person had ever lived before. There are few greater ways to experience a sense of potential than holding a new-born baby in your arms.

While the birth of people is vital for the human race, the birth of new things is also important for human society.

We need new products for a new generation of consumers, new medicines to combat new diseases, new ways of communicating in an increasingly dynamic world, and new modes of commercial activity to respond to the rapidly changing demands of local and world trade.

We need new flexible ways to be employees, and new ways, as business owners, to manage a diversified, segmented, and dislocated workforce. We need new ways to be civic leaders, able to anticipate the shifting sands of our social evolution, preparing space to grow for our future citizens.

And we need new and creative ways to be the Church in England. God’s Church has discovered that its traditional modes of community engagement will be just some of the ways in which we will now seek to care for our community and present options to investigate issues of faith.

However, just as births are normal for any community, so are deaths. Death involves the passing of someone you love, and then adjusting to life without that person. That painful transition can threaten to upend your whole world.

Change can be extremely hard. Death also happens in our social structures, our community organisations, and our commercial world. There are roles, offices, organisations, methods of meeting needs, businesses, commercial partnerships, and ways of working that are simply no longer effective, efficient, or fit for purpose.

Sometimes, we can encounter a deep desire to keep using old modes of doing things even when the world has irrevocably changed, and the consumer, the need, the interest, or the demand is no longer there.

As new life is breaking through, as new businesses are starting, as new partnerships and work cycles are being established, and as new initiatives are being launched, they can be hampered by valiant attempts to try to make the ‘old thing’ live again.

Perhaps the only real constant in life is change. Change happens because we human beings are magnificently creative, as God has designed us to be.

The social world changes because we are constantly recreating ourselves and our environment. Inevitably, society and our structures change slower than we do as people, because new things must be proven to allow us to have confidence in them.

However, new things rarely fully form, blossom, and flourish unless some other things come to their necessary end.

We usually do not have the resources to do both the new thing and the old thing well. Deciding, as a leader, group, community, or business, what has come to its necessary end is difficult indeed, particularly if that thing, like a person, is dearly loved by you and, in part, defines you.

My suspicion is that in this next year there will be some important new things starting in our community which will need our support and encouragement.

There will also be some traditional community and faith practices that will need to be invested in and preserved for the good of this and future generations.

At the same time, there will be some things that, whilst dearly loved and valued, will need to be left behind to make room for the better thing