The Church and Change ...

This past week I had the opportunity to sit in on two workshop/conference events in Winnipg focusing on the concept of Housing First (I will blog more about this later - like food security, it has become one of my new passions!!). One of the conferences was held in a hotel in Winnipeg where one of the overnight guests was some guy named Stephen Harper - the RCMP security was tight and VERY noticable ... I even bumped into an RCMP Officer who had been in Minnedosa a few years ago - it was good (and strange) to get caught up under such circumstances ...

What struck me though was the absolute FEAR that rolled through the room when the presenters started presenting the radically common sense solution that Housing First offers to the crisis of homelessness ... Housing First is like it sounds, a commitment to HOUSE the homeless person first and foremost. There is no need for the person to stop drinking or enter rehab - that can come later BY THEIR CHOICE if they want to ...

Instead, the commitment is to house them in a HOME of thier own and let them make decisions about their long term mental and physical health on THEIR terms with 24 hour support from the service providers.

It's a radical concept with a success rate of 75 to 80% of successfully housing individuals who had been chronically homeless, AND best of all, in time the substance abuse issues disappear as stability is offered and lived ... It's an amazing concept that is working in New York City and in Toronto and is being copied in dozens of other centres. But in Winnipeg this week people heard the ideas and reacted with FEAR ...

There was an unwillingness to open one's mind up to a NEW way of doing things and seeing the world ... As I sat and listened to the opposition and resistance I realized that the contention of one of the presenters was dead on. He said - "people aren't resistant to the idea of change, they just don't like the transition from here to there ..."

Yesterday I had a conversation with a gentleman who has walked away from "The Church" and misses it ... his reason was that the Church is intellectually dishonest in maintaining a conservative, narrow-minded, politically correct vision of faith that offers comfort and complacency rather than challenging us to re-vision the world ... he said that The Church is often about fearing that which is different, and that which would challenge us and change the way things are ...

He was SO right ... fear is rampant in our society ... fear is rampant in our Churches, our neighbourhoods, our world ... we fear that which is different ... we fear that which will challenge us ... we fear that which represents a stretch beyond our comfort zone ...

Sadly though when fear takes hold the small groups of people operating in relative ignorance can influence larger groups of people, and like the poster above says - one should never underestimate the stupidity that can come into play ... I've experienced it in many forms and in many venues - I've lived through the vicious stupidity of otherwise intelligent people trying to address their fear by avoiding change - and I continue to see it unfolding when new ideas are introduced and the response is an angry - "it can't work here" ...

Change is inevitable, and with knowledge, faith and more than a little risk - almost anything is possible - even changing the world ...

To me, the poster below is one of the most inspiring posters I've encountered. One person's avalanche of destruction is another's zone of opportunity.

It's all a matter of perspective: