Resilient
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I have a t-shirt that I've owned my entire adult life. It's not my favourite shirt but I don't dislike it either so it stays in the rotation and keeps getting worn and washed year after year. I remember buying it, not because it was a special purchase or a special event, but because as a college student I sometimes felt the need to get away from everybody on campus and collect my thoughts, so I would go down to the Polo Park area in Winnipeg and wander around in the mall late in the evening as the stores closed. On one of those trips I bought this blue striped shirt at The Bay and here it still is in my drawer all these years later.
It wasn't an expensive shirt, it's not made from some high-performance athletic cloth or long fibre ring spun specialty cotton. It was a shirt on a sale rack with a bunch of other shirts. However, for some complex set of reasons that I don't understand, this particular shirt has outlasted dozens of other shirts that I've owned over the years. Some of those other shirts were nicer, more expensive, and made from better materials, but they didn't last and this one did.
My shirt is resilient. In this context resilience is the ability to withstand wear and tear over time. We use this word in everyday language as an extension of its technical meaning which is the ability of a material to spring back into its original shape after being stretched, bent, compressed, or deformed in some other way. A spring is resilient while Play-Doh is not.
It's worth noting that the opposite of resilience is not fragility, either technically or in everyday use. Something (or someone) that is fragile is easily damaged but may be quite flexible in use and quite able to return to shape or function. The opposite of resilience is brittleness. A brittle object (or person) may be extremely hard or very strong but it will shatter into pieces and destroyed under pressure.
Resilience is a popular term in recent years especially among teachers but also in the church. School staff want students to become adults who are resilient rather than brittle. After a number of years in the '90s and early '00s when schools tried to make classroom and playground environments as safe as absolutely possible there is renewed interest in training children to have some risk management skills. For example, while it's true that you might fall off the monkey bars and hurt yourself, learning to manage that risk of falling is an important part of play and it's OK to experience some risk in manageable levels. You don't want so much risk that the student may impale themselves on a stake but it's also not good to have so little risk that falling from a high place results in a consequence free tumble into a foam pit with no lesson learned at all.
The same thing is true in churches. Especially in Protestant churches, there are many generations of emphasis on true, accurate, or (in church-speak) orthodox, teaching and preaching. More recently there is also interest in the role that those who hear have in discerning or deciding for themselves how to interpret and apply the teachings of church leaders. In this way, the teaching and learning process of the church is an ongoing conversation among God, the record of Scripture, church leaders, and those who hear the teaching. People's faith becomes resilient when we are reminded that it's possible for church leaders to make mistakes and lead the congregation in the wrong direction. As much as it's the responsibility of church leaders to work carefully at setting a good direction, it's also the responsibility of those who hear that teaching to discuss and discern the value of those lessons. In that way, any mistakes or incorrect assumptions can be caught before they cause too much damage. Leaders are constrained by thoughtful prayerful conversation with those who hear. Those who hear may not simply and mindlessly do as they're told – we must sort through, refine, interpret, apply, and in some cases correct or dissent against errors or misguided teaching proposed by our leaders.
There are a couple of things to keep in mind as we travel down this good path towards becoming more resilient Christians. The first is that we become resilient as a church body, not primarily as individual believers. Some people are brittle, fragile, or weakened as a result of earlier injury in the same way that some kids can fall out of a tree, bounce off a rock and not think anything of it while others end up going to the ER with a broken leg. The kid with the broken leg can't simply summon up a bunch of resilience and get over it and those who are easily injured in their faith also don't mysteriously become resilient simply by wishing it were so. We become a resilient body of believers when those who feel flexible and strong can protect and help those who are brittle, fragile, or weaker in their time of need. We can be confident that the kid who falls out of the tree without any injury may be frozen with anxiety when they need to give a speech in front of a group or some other job in which they are weaker or more brittle and their buddy with the broken leg can display resilience, confidence, and composure. So, unexpectedly, a group becomes resilient when it is most clearly aware of the weakest, most brittle parts of each participant. Those who are strong and resilient in one way will need help or protection in another area. Those who seem most easily shattered may rise to an occasion in which everyone else has come undone. When we hide our weaknesses from one another there isn't opportunity for others to help in those areas and so the more resilient each of us appears to be the less resilient we may be as a group.
Second, like anything else resilience can be used badly. If I tell a joke that insults or offends you and then dismiss your concern by saying you should be more resilient, I have taken a useful tool and made a weapon out of it. In any relationship, but especially in the church, we are on dangerous ground whenever we use a sentence that begins with the phrase, “You should be more ... “ whether the word that comes next is 'resilient', 'brave', 'patient', or 'evangelical'. Especially with resilience, that sentence puts the responsibility to heal faster on the one who is injured and may allow the one who caused injury to avoid coming to terms with their own fault or area of weakness. So, we can become more resilient as a group as we care for one another. I can work towards becoming more resilient in areas that easily cause cracks in my own response. But if I say that YOU should be more resilient in some area it's possible that it's actually ME or WE as a group who need to do the hard work.
Finally, as Christians we have goals besides resilience and some of them may come before resilience. My old t-shirt isn't an especially good shirt. It droops and sags in unattractive ways. The stripes don't line up from side to side. Its only good quality is that somehow or other it never wears out. Simply surviving for thirty years is not necessarily success and could actually be a flaw in some situations. Jesus could easily have had a more durable ministry with some changes to his approach but he chose to be vulnerable, compassionate, and confrontational rather than durable. Several very long-standing branches of the Christian church have come under criticism in recent years for reluctance to admit ways that they protected abusive behaviour in the past. They have displayed great resilience at the expense of vulnerable people in their care but it's not a positive form of resilience. Resilience, like other forms of strength, is only positive when it's used towards positive goals. The writer of 1 John does not say, “Resilience comes from God. Anyone who is resilient is born of God and knows God.” Instead, resilience can be positive or negative and is only positive when it serves the one positive goal that scripture consistently puts at the top of the list – the command to love. “Love comes from God. Anyone who loves is born of God and knows God ... if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us”
I won't wear my good old resilient shirt this weekend. It's Christmas and New Year - as resilient as that old thing is it's not very celebratory. In some situations, I would rather celebrate than be resilient. I also won't wear it to bed tonight because I have more comfortable shirts. In some situations, I would rather be comfortable than resilient. It's a good, common, plain, durable shirt that does one thing well. That's enough. I hope we become a resilient body of believers following Jesus along with all the other qualities that draw us together in the love of God as this new year begins.
