Avoid Magical Thinking

By John Daugherty

“I wish…” “If things would just go back to the way they were…” “Let’s just do what we’ve always done…”

Any of those sound familiar? We all can tend to fall back to magical thinking, especially when things are hard, challenging, unfamiliar, and well, new. It is tempting to pray for grand, magical miracles to intervene and make things all right again. If I hadn’t missed the magic wand class in seminary I could simply wave that wand and make things like they were or the way we wish they were.

This is an old human tendency. In the first thirteen verses of the fourth chapter of Luke, Jesus retreated to the wilderness for fasting and preparation before embarking on his “official” three years of ministry. While there, I imagine he struggled in his humanity with the enormity of the task – to establish the kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven. How would that be possible? How could he garner enough attention to begin transforming people’s lives?

After a couple of weeks of the arid desert isolation he must have been hungry, thirsty and deeply pursuing a vision of that pending ministry. In Luke’s gospel we read the story of the tempter coming along to help out. What did he offer? Magic! Command the rocks to turn to bread and you will not be hungry… and subsequently he could have fed all the hungry through magic and manipulation. “You need power. Come with me and I’ll show you all the world you can see and I’ll give you the power to rule and force people into your kingdom,” said the tempter. “You want attention?” And his answer again magic – “throw yourself from the highest point of the Temple and the angels will swoop down and save you.”

If you’re not familiar with the dialogue, you might want to revisit Luke 4:1-13 and you’ll find Jesus refused to manipulate with sensation and magic. He said that’s not how God’s kingdom would be built. Then he spent the next three years demonstrating how those who follow him are to be about the kingdom building business. It is about discipline, which includes going, serving, sacrificing, loving, forgiving. It is about relationships with the world around us.

Over time the church has become distracted with all the worldly shortcuts of sensation – right music, right environment, right rules, right doctrine, right ritual. Believing that if “members” would just get all of that right, then magically the church would grow, be “successful” and have all the money, talent and facilities they could ever dream of. And for a while it appeared to work. Then, boom!... some major volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous event disrupts everything! Our world is slowly emerging from just such a V.U.C.A. event with the global pandemic of the Covid-19 novel virus. Church as we knew it came to a screeching halt. Nothing is as it was.

One may observe there are two primary responses as the church emerges: churches will take advantage of the amazing opportunity to move into a new world with a new vision, shape and method for effectively being kingdom builders; or, churches and members will fall into the temptation of relying on magic. “If we just go back to what we were doing before, everything will get back to normal.” “If we can just find the right new thing to glom onto we can have the church we love and with which we are so very comfortable and have all those new families we so desperately need to keep things afloat.

Every crisis can destroy or provide new opportunity. The Chinese symbol for crisis has two characters: one represents danger and the other opportunity. Let’s scrap the magical thinking. Let’s not fall into the temptation of the sensational, or sink to the level of having power to force outcomes. Let’s not waste this great new opportunity to build something new, to pursue a vision of ministry, mission and compassion.