By The Rev. Dr. Carl Grosse

“You say you want a revolution; well, you know – we all wanna change the world”. That song has stuck with me since I heard it on the White Album my friend’s sister had just purchased back in 1970. Like so many things then, The Beatles and this song were polarizing topics. My friend and I felt we had to listen to the album in secret. If we had any opinions about it, or the war, or racism, or Nixon, or a hundred other things that seemed to get ordinary people riled up, best just to keep a low profile. Besides, we were the last of the “children should be seen and not heard” dinosaurs that soon became extinct.

Human beings like to manage and control this world more than any other critter. From global politics to the thermostat on the wall, we know what we want and we want it now. So much of this world is not the way we think it should be, and we can get rather riled up telling others how wrong they are and pursuing what we think is right. Churchy world is no exception, and this fierce quest for taking control of the situation and setting things up “how they should be” is precisely why we have denominations and 27 churches per thousand people (a made-up ratio, but probably close when the people are those who actually want to go to church). 

The real irony is that the One whom churchy world claims to follow had (and still has) the power to make this world into anything He wants (so we profess to believe), but did not use it that way. He did have a plan to change the world (see Genesis 12:2-3), but not through controlling the social, political, and economic machinery we’ve constructed. Each of us influences the world for good or evil. What God does is enable us for good, then lets us go ahead and live in ways that bless the world, changing it incrementally rather than systematically. Jesus did not seize power and force a revolution, and that is not the strategy for His followers (see John 18:36).

If we – not others – lose track of what our Leader wants this world to look like, and that He’s counting on us to simply live like righteous children, then we should not expect much improvement. If we want governments or businesses or churches or schools to be the solution, why have a Savior much less a Lord? It’s up to us to learn what Jesus wants and to do it. That’s how we change the world. And people thought the Beatles were crazy!