A Long Lost Formula
I dredged up a long lost formula the other day. It franky hadn’t crossed my mind since high school when a teacher said with great feeling, “You’re going to need this someday.” That advice, quickly forgotten, came back to me suddenly when I started thinking again about Momentum–an effort here in the Northwest to change church members attitude about evangelism–that it’s an everyday connection with real people, not just a 14-night event that your church hosts once in awhile.
In the physical world there is actually a formula of sorts for Momentum. As I understand it (and, yes, my high school memories are increasingly fuzzy) Momentum describes the relationship between the Inertia and Velocity of an object. Inertia is the state of being–either of inaction or action. If an object is standing still, it takes a great deal of energy to change that inactivity into motion. On the other hand, once an object has been placed in motion, it takes a lot of energy to stop it. The more mass the object has along with increasing velocity, the harder it is to stop it. The greater the Momentum, the harder it is to deaccelerate. It’s sort of a natural consequence of Newton’s first and second laws of motion.
So, what is the state of Momentum within our Northwest churches? What is our state of Momentum as individual believers? It takes a great deal of energy to get any one of us to move beyond status quo–a inertia of inaction. But once a few of us move beyond status quo to motion, our mass is increased, and hence our Momentum is increased.
You can see this principle enacted in negative ways, as in a mob mentality, where individuals, who wouldn’t normally commit a crime, do so because everyone else is. But can’t that also prove true in positive ways–where the timid soul realizes that they are not alone in wanting to do something noble and good?
The Northwest is labeled as having the greatest number of “unchurched” people. What would it take to change that state of inertia? That’s a question best answered first in our own hearts, in our own churches. Status quo will never do what an increasing sense of Momentum jmight.