Thursday, February 8, 2007

playing with einstein


Jan Edmiston recently did a post on her blog entitled "Everything Must Change". She addressed how the church must change "the way we worship, prepare new members, spend our resources (& especially our time), train seminarians, run middle judicatories." [Umm...whatever middle judicatories are!]

Rodger Sellers sent the nifty Everything Must Change logo you see above. I love how the logo is a visual play on Einstein's E=mc² (where energy = mass x the square of the speed of light in a vacuum).

The famous physics formula proposes that when a body has a mass, there is a large amount of energy associated with that mass. How do you get from mass to energy? You need the conversion factor, c².

Looking at our "church" formula, one might also ask how to get from our mass (or church body) to energy. Appropriately, you need a conversion factor! Of course in our church formula "c" isn't the speed of light; the "c" stands for "change". And I think the change needed is pretty radical. In fact, I think we also need c² (change squared!) Therein lies the problem (change can be painful), yet therein also lies the reward (tremendous energy!)
--Barb

2 comments:

Rev SS said...

RIGHT ON! (middle judacatories in PC(USA) are the Presbytery and Synod)

Rev SS said...

ps ... this is my favorite of all your posts. I love the connections you make. And Einstein is one of my favorite people. (One the the simplest, most accurate statements he ever made is: definition of insanity: "keep doing same things same ways and expect different results" ... which unfortunately also describes the church, methinks!