Values, Norms and Habits

Will there still be a place for me?

Will the things that matter to me – that I love – still exist here?

Is my church going to leave me?

The prospect of change in an institution where we feel safe makes us anxious. Our sense of belonging is challenged and threatened. It’s a natural human response, made worse in our time by the rapid, often unsettling changes that surround us. We want our church to be a refuge.

I sometimes refer to the Episcopal Church and my congregation as “My Church.” In reality, however, it’s God’s church, a vehicle for the work and grace of God to reach into the world. It’s not that the church doesn’t exist for those currently in it, but it exists equally for those outside. The church isn’t a building, though it’s easy for me to default to that conception of it. The church represents action. Anywhere and anytime God’s work is happening in the world, the church is present there.

As I think and pray about the future of the Episcopal Church, I wonder how the church can hear the voice of the Holy Spirit in the midst of the chaos surrounding it, I wonder about change (who has the right to call for it and who has the right to block it?), and I wonder about how we identify what is valuable to remain and what is no longer necessary.

My thinking has begun to focus on the distinction between values, norms and habits. Values are core understandings that have been revealed or chosen over time, with care. We Episcopalians as a group value the centrality of grace and we embrace mystery, for instance. They are expressions of our core.

Norms are the rules that structure our life together. These are sometimes carefully negotiated and sometimes have simply grown over time (and no one remembers when they began). A norm at one church might be that intercessory prayers are made silently; at another church the might be spoken aloud.

Habits are behaviors we take on, often for our convenience and without prior thought. I sit in the same corner of the same pew nearly every Sunday. It is literally my “comfort zone.” Other people go to coffee hour and sit with the same friends they’ve seen each week for twenty years.

As we think about the future of God’s church, what is essential and what is not, I am thinking about values, norms and habits. It seems to me that values are enduring, carefully chosen and carefully changed. It’s not that they are immutable, but they are resilient. Norms – particularly those carefully chosen – are useful and may be effective, but they are more subject to change than values. Habits are subject to change most of all.

What values, norms and habits matter most to you, and which ones are you willing to consider changing?

Greg Rhodes