About a week ago, we toured our son’s new middle school. While Grade 5 isn’t technically middle school or junior high, moving grade 5 students to the middle school was the solution to overcrowding at the French Immersion elementary school l in our neighbourhood. 

I don’t remember the last time I was inside of a middle school, probably about 20 years ago when I played Basketball on an adult recreation team. But certainly, the last time I really explored a middle school, poking around classrooms, the music room, art room, cafeteria, drama stage, computer lab etc… well, I think it might have been since I was last in middle school. That’s about 30 years ago to my math. 

And yet, it was amazing how quickly all the memories of my own experiences starting Junior High School came flooding back. There is a certain formative freedom to that age, where you go from the hands-on nature of elementary school to being responsible for getting yourself to from class to class, navigating the complex social dynamics of teenage years and learning that with new freedom comes responsibility. 

There was something about walking down the locker-filled hallways, looking into classrooms filled with desks, imagining the hustle of in-between class periods movement. It almost felt like I was the one back starting at a new school, getting ready for a new school year. 

What struck me was how powerful the memory of those emotions was, the emotions and feelings of middle school: the stress and anxiety around fitting in, the uncertainty about the future, and the complexity of the transition from childhood to adolescence. 

Memories and emotions from significant and formative experiences often blindside us at unexpected times. 

It is an experience that I think might happen more often than I think at church, and that I frequently miss, whether it is long-time active members being in church buildings filled with a lifetime of significant and formative memories, or folks returning after being away and having all the memories come flooding back of earlier life experiences. Like a teacher whose relationship and experience of school change through the experience of teaching, as a pastor, my relationship with the church has been changed through the experience of ministry. 

The other thing I noted on my tour of the middle school, was that not everything was the same as I remember middle school. There was new technology (with lots of posters about the school cell phone ban), but also signs of a changing world with an emphasis on inclusion and diversity, care for the climate and efforts to teach kids how to be caring and responsible community members. 

Though certainly churches have changed too, with new technology and updated ways of working together, I wonder if someone who hadn’t been in a church in 30 years would find similar new and relevant cultural emphasis as well? I am not sure, and I am genuinely curious to find out. 

Either way, the signs of change and new things are coming – in fact God just may be placing them right before our eyes. Even as we remember the past, God is doing a new thing with us.