Outrageous response to major change

"Church leaders so quickly and easily describe certain types of reaction to change as immature or even rebellious"

Our reaction to major change and disruption is a constant source of amazement and occasional amusement to me. I am intrigued to see the way church leaders so quickly and easily describe certain types of reaction as immature or even rebellious. This can make those leaders (myself included) reluctant to put further investment into the person’s training, resulting in us capping their leadership growth and inadvertently further reducing the pool of able leaders.

I want to work through the Gospel narrative and see how Jesus’ senior leadership reacted to him introducing major change. The most important thing we must bear in mind is that Jesus never gave up on them. The first reaction I want to mention is the potentially stalling statement made by Peter.

Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and that he must be killed, and on the third day be raised to life. Peter’s outrageous response was to rebuke Jesus saying,  “Never, Lord!”…. “This shall never happen to you!” Matt 16:22

The NIV commentary succinctly sums this up, “Peter’s strong will and warm heart linked to his ignorance produced a shocking bit of arrogance.” We will look at the different ways Jesus handled their reactive statements in future blogs.

Next blog -  who is the greatest!?!

Outrageous response to major change

Our reaction to major change and disruption is a constant source of amazement and occasional amusement to me. I am intrigued to see the way church leaders so quickly and easily describe certain types of reaction as immature or even rebellious. This can make those leaders (myself included) reluctant to put further investment into the person’s training, resulting in us capping their leadership growth and inadvertently further reducing the pool of able leaders.