There are many congregations in local churches whose ways of celebrating their faith have lost touch with the surrounding culture.  It is obvious that Christian worship and practice needs to change to appeal to, and draw in, new people seeking to develop a relationship with God.  Many older folk look back longingly to the heyday of their church in the fifties and sixties and wish for people to join them in their much-loved church.  However, many such congregations strongly resist changing the way they do things.  Why is this so?  It is easy to write off these faithful people as stubborn and recalcitrant.  But perhaps the real reason is not character flaws but a phenomenon known as social identity.

Social Identity

The concept of social identity was first formulated in the seventies by Henry Tajfel and later developed with John Turner.[1] They were interested in why conflict exists between groups.  However, the concept has been developed and used in other ways as well.  I believe that social identity helps us to understand resistance to change; but first let’s delve more deeply into the meaning of social identity.

We all have a personal identity but we also have many social identities.  So what is social identity?  All human beings belong to a variety of groups, e.g family, social clubs, schools, work places, sports clubs as players, managers or fans, and last but not least, churches.  Our membership of our particular groups means a lot to us.  Some people are passionately devoted to their particular football team, others wear their old school tie with pride. Being part of the Uniting Church is central to my sense of who I am as is the fact that I come from a long line of Methodists.

When people belong to a local church they share the goals, values and ways of doing business of that particular church. They become very attached to their church and its various groups. It is this deep sense of the local church being our place, our community, that holds the congregation together.  It is this sense of belonging to the group that gives the individuals their sense of social identity.

When a change is proposed in, for example, how the congregation worships, the time of worship, the music style, or how the interior of the church is arranged, many people feel as though their innermost being has been assaulted.  In my experience there are three typical responses to a proposed change of group practices when people’s social identity is affected:

First there is opposition in which people fight to retain what has always been.

The second is to leave.

The third is to cooperate with the process.

How then can we introduce much needed change into local churches without destroying them?

The Source of Social Identity – God or the Group?

The Apostle Paul seeks to impress on the early Christians that their group identity is in Christ, not in themselves.  He supplies them with a beautiful metaphor, the Body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12, New Living Translation).  Their relationships with one another are therefore sacred. They are to be connected to one another through the gifts of the Spirit, not for the sake of each other, but for the sake of Christ and Christ’s mission.  This mission is expressed beautifully in Luke 4:18-19, where Jesus says, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, for he has anointed me to bring Good News to the poor.  He has sent me to proclaim that captives will be released, that the blind will see, that the oppressed will be set free, and that the time of the Lord’s favour has come.” (New Living Translation).

Jesus did not found the institutional church but came to bring about the Realm of God.  That is our mission as well.

Unfortunately, our human propensity to derive our social identity from the groups we belong to, often trumps Christ’s mission.  Our shared goals and practices are focused on what makes us feel comfortable. We identify with ourselves and our ways of being together, rather than becoming a Spirit-filled community.  These two sets of social identities, viz. “happy group of friends doing church work” versus “a Spirit-filled community”, do not always coincide.  The first is focused on the people and the second is focused on God.

Is there anything we can do?

I remember a remarkable older woman who had come to terms with assaults on her social identity within the church.  My friend had been Methodist all her life until the Uniting Church was established in 1977.  When Uniting Church worship services began, the tunes to familiar hymns were often those favoured by the ex-Presbyterians. She was unsettled by this and often went home from church in an agitated state.  Finally, she decided that she had to start coming to church “for the others” rather than for herself.  She realised that the ex-Presbyterians had to cope with ex-Methodists’ practices and even hymns favoured by the ex-Congregationalists.  Once she had made her decision to “come to church for the others”, she found to her surprise that she was getting much more from worship than she ever had before.  Years later when we began to have family services she confided in me that she didn’t like the songs much but it was fine because she was “coming to church for the families”.  In this way my friend adjusted her social identity and so kept pace with the times.  Worship, although changed in style, continued to be an enriching experience for her.

In future blogs I will further identify factors that cause us to remain “stuck” in the past, and then propose some strategies to help us progress toward being a Spirit filled community.

What do you think about these ideas?  Please contact me here and let me know your thoughts about the concept of social identity.

REFERENCES AND END NOTES

Turner, J.C., Hogg M.A., Oakes, P.J., S.D.., & Wetherell, M.S. (1987) Rediscovering the social group; A self-categorization theory. Oxford, England: Blackwell.