Change, Conflict, and Trust
Tom Rockwell
July 26, 2026
I’m Tom Rockwell, Associate Superintendent of Western Yearly Meeting
I’ve been spending a lot of time lately talking to Meetings about change, transitions, and the fears and anxieties that surface in these unpredictable periods of new beginnings.
And if there was ever a season when congregations needed a new beginning, it is now.
Pretty much every church in America—of every size, tradition, and theology—is trying to reinvent itself for the current moment.
And if we’re honest, most are not doing very well. The world has changed faster than most churches' habits and structures, and faster than our imaginations and cultures can even grasp.
The lack of adaptation shows: Quakers closed 24% of their meetings and churches between 2010-2020.
Pretty much every other church sees similar or worse decline. The world has changed very rapidly and churches have struggled to keep themselves relevant to the lives of younger generations.
So in pretty much every church you see a much greater share of grey heads than you would have seen 30 years ago. Churches being mostly older is not problematic in every way but it obviously bodes ill for the future of churches.
There is a vast array of sociological changes that underlie these trends: the digital revolution, change in american family structures, huge economic changes, women entering the workforce, the rise of spiritual but not religious people. The list goes on.
But for now I just want one statistic that emphasizes the amount of change younger generations experience to show what we have to respond to.
So I have focused on moving: Baby boomers moved on average 1.28 times per decade after reaching 18 years of age. Millennials have moved 2.97 times per decade.
So on average, millennials have moved every four years or so. Not easy to settle down, to join a community, to lay deep roots, when you’re constantly on the move.
And Friends Meetings are all about deep roots and deep communities. What we have to offer - the deep community that young people really want - is very difficult for younger people to really access.
First Friends Indy has been talking this summer about how they can be closer as a meeting and develop deeper relationships. I think this is exactly what meetings should be focusing on. How do we deepen our relationships and then how do we invite new people into those relationships?
I want to focus in on the ways the anxiety we all experience from how much our world has changed gets in the way of deep relationship
There are tangible ways like young people moving, but there are also more nebulous ways this anxiety impacts that I think are really important.
The instability and anxiety that comes from our constantly changing world often causes us to avoid conflict in our inner circles because we just can’t deal with more change and anxiety
Those avoided conflicts tend to pile up and erode our trust with each other because we’re never talking about what’s really going on and very small conflicts can become difficult to navigate, let alone bigger conflicts.
Conflict is actually necessary for us to build trust with each other and trust is the bedrock of deeper relationship.
So, Today I want to talk about ways change, anxiety, and conflict, appear in the Bible and how the people of God have responded to those changes.
I especially want to focus on anxiety.
When we are forced to deal with new things and unknown people, we become anxious.
We don’t know what will be expected of us, it becomes difficult to even define who “us” is. Who are the people we are trying to serve? How do we try to meet the needs of new people, we don’t even know what they want?
If we want to be a people who can speak to the brokenness of the world and the people caught in that brokenness. It is important for us to speak the truth and to be able to navigate the conflicts that inevitably come from the truth.
It is important for us to say aloud: when we start to talk about change, when we start to be more direct with each other and willing to enter conflict in order to build trust, we start to experience anxiety. Trying to change touches nerves. It awakens grief. Conflict puts us on edge. It surfaces fears we have carried silently.
And that is not a problem—that is actually evidence that God is working. Our job in thinking about the future and change is to remind each other that God is calling us to be a community that can speak to what folks in the world need today.
To do that work we need to be able to remind each other that anxiety and discomfort are normal in change and conflict and build skills to encourage each other through the process.
Now,I want to look at three images of this kind of change work in the Bible so that we have some stories to fall back on in encouraging each other and thinking about change.
Scripture gives lots of powerful images of communities in transition, mostly filled with anxiety. I want to focus on three examples.
The first image is Israel in the wilderness
Discomfort with change comes up repeatedly throughout the stories of Israel’s exodus from Egypt. These stories are the standard image for talking about change and anxiety in the Bible.
In the stories the people of Israel have escaped Egypt and crossed the Red Sea. God has parted waters, fed them with manna, guided them with cloud and fire.
And yet—they are anxious. And anxious communities revert to old norms.
They say, “Let us go back to Egypt. At least there we knew what to expect.” They grumble, they get nostalgic, they idealize the past, they turn on their leaders, they lose courage. And they express a desire to go back to a situation where they were literally enslaved to avoid having to deal with new situations that make them anxious.
My favorite Specific Example is the story of the Israelites when they have first surveyed the promised land of Canaan.
Numbers 14:14:1-4: That night all the members of the community raised their voices and wept aloud. 2 All the Israelites grumbled against Moses and Aaron, and the whole assembly said to them, “If only we had died in Egypt! Or in this wilderness! 3 Why is the Lord bringing us to this land only to let us fall by the sword? Our wives and children will be taken as plunder. Wouldn’t it be better for us to go back to Egypt?” 4 And they said to each other, “We should choose a leader and go back to Egypt.
God has brought the people to a new home, they are on the cusp of the reward God has given them for faithfulness and rather than act in faith and go into this new land, they revert to anxiety.
Rather than look at the actual issue they’re dealing with: the fear they have of the people who live in the promised land, they say instead we need new leaders who will take us back to comfort.
They say let's just go back to the way it was! This is too different and too hard!
They avoid what they’re actually afraid of and find a scapegoat - moses - for their fears.
RECAP: This image of God bringing the people of Israel into a new way of life of plenty and freedom that they continually reject out of fear, is the perfect image for our congregations today. It is a continual reminder that we are going to have anxious reactions to new situations and new people and we have an obligation to encourage one another to resist this anxiety.
The second biblical image around Change is Jesus himself.
The pattern of the gospel is death and resurrection—letting go and receiving something new. Change is not the enemy of faith in Christ; it is woven into its very center. You cannot follow a resurrected Lord and expect nothing to die. Christian faith is not about trying to keep dying things alive just the way they are, but instead to live into a cycle of renewal through the new life God continually brings us.
This Christian focus on death and renewal runs against our natural instincts. We tend to fear letting of what we have more than the reward of what will come from change.
Sociological research - Loss aversion
Obviously the wider Religious community of Jesus day was threatened and made anxious by Jesus ministry of change, they decided that they had to kill him to put an end to it - at least so they thought.
But it’s important for us to remember that Jesus’s message of change was threatening for those who believed in him as well.
Matthew 16:21-23: Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life.
22 Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. “Never, Lord!” he said. “This shall never happen to you!”
23 Jesus turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.”
Jesus’s ministry was uncomfortable for those who believed in the ministry. It was not what they were expecting. They thought God was leading them in the direction of a new king who would rule over a new Israelite empire. But instead God was leading them to a kingdom of service to all peoples, not just the people of Israel.
In his fear of the unknown, Peter rejects the center of Jesus ministry, against the words of Jesus himself, and instead focuses on the way he currently experiences the world rather than the new world that God is inviting Peter into.
Jesus refuses to let Peter avoid this essential truth, he pushes back against Peter and says “No you’re seeing things all wrong, this is what has to happen and what is going to happen”.
The story of the Israelites in the desert and the story of Jesus are examples of poorly navigated conflict and well navigated conflict, they’re also big stories where God intervenes very directly in the world. God is leading the people in the desert, Jesus is physically present with the disciples.
But the changes we are experiencing ourselves are a bit different, sociological changes in a rapidly changing work. The change we are looking at is how do we make the message of God as interpreted by Friends relevant to a world that has drastically changed through modernity.
The Bible has another example for us that fits the situation we are in better. That model is the apostle Paul:
The ministry of Paul is all about interweaving people from very different life experiences and cultures into one people. Very similar to the work we are trying to do today. And not shockingly a huge number of Paul’s writing are about conflicts in the early church.
Paul was trying to bring together Jews who were becoming Christians and saw Christianity as the fullest expression of Judaism and Greeks who had no background with Judaism but saw a new way of living in Jesus.
Many of the Jews wanted to retain Jewish practices, many of the Greeks did not see the point in continuing with that old tradition. Throughout his letter Paul is trying to get people to be honest with each other, to talk about what is going on, so they can move on to the larger work of building up their communities.
Paul talks about a ministry where “I have become all things to all people, so that by all means I might save some.” Paul is willing to set aside cultural differences and adapt to the different situations of the people he is working with to try to meet them where they are at.
I believe this is the heart of our work going forward: The work of God is not static; The good news is always the same in that God is inviting us into the same ministry of Jesus: to love one another more fully. But the good news is always different for the different challenges that people of different eras and cultures are facing.
But “being all things to all people” doesn’t mean avoiding our differences and pretending they’re not their, it means leaning into our differences, working to have tough conversations, so we can build trust with each other and deepen our relationships.
The gospel is an invitation to living in a way that declares that God is among us in a way that allows us to live very differently from the ways of the world.
Where the world encourages us to be selfish the Gospel encourages us to seek connection with others. Where the world tells us there is danger in the unknown, the Gospel encourages us to leaps of faith that guide us to new faithfulness. Where the world tells us we don’t have enough and we need to simply protect ourselves and our family, God gives us an offer of a deeper abundance that has enough for all people.
Our job is to take our sense of God’s work and see where our current culture and the religious seekers in it are most in need of God’s presence.
This very much mirrors the ministry of Paul trying to be all things to all people so that we could have a love that goes beyond the cultures of the world and helps us connect with new people.
Howard Thurman said: Community cannot for long feed on itself; it can only flourish with the coming of others from beyond, their unknown and undiscovered brothers and sisters.
We need to constantly reach out to new people to deepen our lives. When we bring in new voices there are inevitably going to be differences and conflicts. The essential work of new r and deeper relationship is tough, honest conversations together. When we speak the truth to one another, God begins to work through all of us. When we avoid the truth because it’s easier to just let it go by, we lose out on the opportunity for God to do something new among us.
We have to remember that like the Israelites in the desert God is leading us in new directions that will make us uncomfortable and we have to be honest with one another about those discomforts.
We have to remember that the ministry of Jesus is a reminder that we have to be willing to let go of some ways of doing things that have ceased to be life-giving and that the pain of those changes is something we need to be able to acknowledge and talk through.
We have to remember the work of Paul, bringing people from very different cultures together into the body of Christ and navigating their differences with the people of God.
As we enter the silence, I encourage you to think about the ways that you can lean into tough conversations with other Friends and find deeper faithfulness.
Query:
How can you lean into tough conversations with other Friends and find deeper faithfulness?