I wish you were more curious.
I wish we were more curious.
I wish I were more curious.
We desperately need churches and leaders that are curious. We need to be asking questions and exploring insights. To confess our ignorance, we need humility. Curiosity acknowledges that we don’t know what we don’t know. Instead, we often get leaders that are over-confident, smug, callous, and disinterested in the latest information. We get churches that are more afraid than they are curious. We get organizations that harden around traditions and old-world thinking. We get people who over-remember the past, only want the familiar, and are paralyzed by the new.
Curiosity is a key ingredient in wisdom, insight, and foresight. When someone is curious, it implies that they recognize they do not have all the answers or know everything there is to know or that they need to know. Curiosity is a sign that the creative gene God implanted in every human being is active and alive. For Christians, curiosity implies that God’s truth is far more expansive than our little corner of truth.
Sadly, most of us aren’t curious. We have our minds made up and are detached from the wonder of the unknown. Many Christians no longer think but settle for spouting sound bites and ignoring those who disagree with them. Too often our faith comes across as rigid, defensive, locked in, and unmovable. We resemble the religious leaders that Jesus sparred with as he told parables designed to unlock their frozen curiosities.
Lately I’ve been curious about how language experts define the opposite of being curious. Some of the words that pop up as antonyms are: bored, apathetic, unconcerned, disinterested, perfunctory, callous, smug, severe, passionless. That, my friends, is the recipe for a dying church, a toxic culture, and a wasted life.
The rise of the COVID-19 pandemic and the epidemic of racism that are polarizing and paralyzing the United States call for more than the willful ignorance of a lazy mind. If we expect to not just survive but thrive in the new world before us, we will need a healthy dose of active curiosity to well up within us and smother our natural inclination toward defensiveness and/or indifference.
I believe that our current crises will only be transformed into avenues of blessing when we humbly adopt a commitment to cultivate a spirit of holy curiosity. When we do, we will discover in our wondering the imaginative power and vision of the Holy Spirit. It is in our curiosity that we will be inspired to dream dreams and see visions that are otherwise invisible to our closed minds.
Please pause this week and thoughtfully embrace holy curiosity before it is too late. Our world needs you. Your church needs you. Most importantly, God needs you to allow the Divine Dream for this world and its people to become your calling.
For Reflection and Discussion
- What programs have we been doing as a church that was not as important as we thought?
- What have we NOT been doing that is a great deal more important than we knew?
- Why is racism so pervasive and deep-rooted in our hearts and institutions?
- What will our church do differently as a result of what we learned in 2020?
- Who do we need to pay more attention to? Less?
- What is God’s dream for our church’s relationship with all who live in our community?
- What ways have we been reduced to conforming to our world rather than transforming it?
