The activity of seeking is a pursuit with energy toward a particular end. How that pursuit is explored and what energy is driving it may, in fact, vary. Each of us is seeking something in our lives, whether socially, economically, and yes, even politically. Each of us is motivated differently by what is that we seek. For instance, some of us seek meaning, significance, recognition, companionship, control and/or stability. What we all share similarly is a path of seeking amid uncertain futures. This seeking activity betrays a longing of restless hearts for some semblance of security and predictability about our futures that may resolve if not minimize anxieties. 

One author speaks of a new norm of organizational life as “living in the vulnerable present, amid our uncertain future, is now our permanent condition.” This captures well the current state and challenge of organizational life, including churches, and what it is that we seek greater clarity about. 

Seeking is not only motivated and bound, however, by unpredictability of uncertain futures. It can also be playful as in the game. The playfulness of seeking finds its life in the discovery of one hidden, and who is found. In our life together as a Christian community we are well served by this reminder, that is not only our own efforts of seeking a future where the future is actually discovered. For the Christian community, it is in the discovering that God is seeking us even in our seeking of God. 

Years ago, Mother Theresa was interviewed about prayer. She was asked what she prays for. She replied that prayer for her is listening to God. To which the interviewer followed up by asking what it is that God is saying. Mother Theresa, profoundly replied, ‘silence, God is listening as well.’ 

How will we seek? How can we seek appropriate to our identity as God’s children, as God’s promised community where Christ assures us of his unconditional presence and movement in our world? 

Sure, there are certainly plans and organizational policies and procedures to be responsibly pursued. And yet, let us also proceed with a view to the God in Christ who is both the object and subject of our seeking. For without a sense of the Spirit guiding this ship that is the church, we become an unmoored sailboat carried by cultural currents that may, in fact, resemble nothing of the God who is leading us. 

– Pastor David