Why Wonder and Monotony are Better Than Innovation.

After nearly three decades of pastoral ministry, I have found that the one thing the church in our day loves most is change and innovation. This is because modern culture has had a greater effect on the contemporary church than the church has had on our present culture.

If you have been around church culture long enough, you will have heard pastors talk about Good to Great as if Collins were the replacement for Judas rather than Matthias. You will have heard people say (as I have said myself) that the message doesn’t change, but the methods do. This sounds good, but as Marshall McLuhan famously said, “The medium is the message.” What we say is of great importance; how we say it is equally important. There are few things modern Christian leaders fear more than being labeled “irrelevant.”

I have come to realize that there is something inside of us that fears the steady truth that much of our ministry is mundane. We want to be known as innovative. For years, my drive was to be known as an innovative leader. I spent more time looking forward than learning from the past. I knew what apps were out and read every leadership book I could get my hands on by the current who's who in the secular and church worlds. It wasn’t until my forties that I finally read a book by someone who had lived centuries earlier. I was guilty of what C.S. Lewis calls chronological snobbery. The arrogant idea that what we know today is all we need to know, ignoring the wisdom of the ancients. The belief that modern problems cannot be solved with ancient answers.

Several years ago, I reread Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton. (It is, ironically, one of the few books John Piper has confessed to rereading.) I don’t see eye to eye with Chesterton on everything, but in reading Orthodoxy, my modern mind was challenged by old ideas. Ideas that have stood the test of time. This is why I like reading books by dead people. Books that have survived have something to say not only to their generation but also to ours. Chesterton’s words hit me like a ton of bricks. He was telling me, from nearly a hundred years ago, how to survive our modern age with our faith intact. He is saying we need a greater capacity for wonder and the ability to exult in the mundane.

Chesterton, in his typically Chestertonian way, says this:

“Everything is in an attitude of mind; and at this moment I am in a comfortable attitude. I will sit still and let the marvels and the adventures settle on me like flies. There are plenty of them, I assure you. The world will never starve you for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.”

What Chesterton is saying is profound. To put it in economic terms, we do not have a lack of wonder because of a lack of supply but because of a lack of demand. I have found in my life that the relentless desire for innovative thinking and wondering at what is next leaves me, over time, unable to wonder at what is. I find myself working to make ministry exciting and new, rather than taking time to observe and pay attention to what God is doing in others around me and in the world he has made. Excessive innovation leads me to have a soul unsatisfied with what God says is “Good” and to chase what Collins says is “great.”

Often, my drive to do and be the next best thing leaves my soul impoverished and my imagination limited by what is possible. Wonder doesn’t do that. Instead, wonder sees the world God has made, the miracles of healing and salvation in the community I serve, as what they are, products of God’s miraculous handiwork and my faithful service.

We need to stop our drive for innovation at all costs. If, in the six years since the pandemic, we have only learned to innovate in delivering our religious goods, we have missed the purpose of that trial. We need not think the next frontier in the church is having church on Zoom. Instead, we need to slow down and wonder. The only way we can expand our capacity to wonder is to begin to wonder and allow God to do his work in our church families and in us. When we “do anything short of sin to reach people,” it is easy to forget the wonder-working power of God, who is the author and finisher of our faith.

Growing up Charismatic, one of the things we were implicitly taught was that monotony was sinful. For example, written or repeated prayers were insincere, and they can be. But it wired me to believe that monotony was to be avoided at all costs, especially in all things related to our creative, all-powerful, spontaneous God. I have come to learn that monotony is not something that should be shunned but something we should aspire to. I learned this from teaching kids for over twenty years and from reading Orthodoxy by Chesterton. In Orthodoxy, Chesterton makes a powerful observation about children and the nature of God that I have been meditating on for days. He says this:

“The thing I mean (speaking of monotony) can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again,”; and the grow-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony.

But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore.”

What a powerful picture of what Jesus meant when he said, “Unless we become like a little child, we will never see the kingdom of heaven.” Because, unlike a little child, we will not be satisfied with this life’s mundane plainness, we seek to build our own kingdom, one that has better bells and whistles. To exult in monotony is something that takes strength of mind, not the simplicity of mind as we often think.

We think that the goal of life and ministry is to come up with a better version of a daisy a daisy 2.0 if you will. God delights in the perfection of his creation so much that he never gets tired of making them. We think that the way forward for the church is for God to do a new thing. What we really need is for him to do an old thing again. We need him to send his spirit again, we need him to transform our hearts again, we need him to change our desires and our affections to match his…again.

The church today is no longer central in secular culture. We will not experience the renewal and revival we long for through innovation, but rather through a people of God captivated by the wonder of God, able to rejoice in the beauty of monotony—just like God.

As the church emerges from the cocoon of its present trial, my prayer is that we do not try to remove our cocoon through artificial means. But allow God to do his work in us, and when he is done, to look with wonder at what he has done and say to God, “Do it again.”