Change, it seems, is usually a process we believe best conducted in private. Rather like trying on a new outfit in a clothes shop, decency demands that we disappear into the privacy of a changing room. Only once our new clothes are tidily in place are we ready to emerge once more into the public gaze. Indeed, expectations of privatised change are even captured in our nursery rhymes – all winter long the ugly duckling hides in the privacy of the reeds where the dirty brown feathers are shed. So, it is only having become ‘the best in town’, that the resplendent swan emerges!

This privatised approach to change has a long history. Joseph Campbell’s famous book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, published in 1949, describes ‘the hero myth’ – a universal narrative in which the hero journeys into a foreign land where transformation takes place. He describes it in this way:

A hero ventures forth from the world of the common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.

But perhaps nowhere is the idea of privatised change more evident than in the practices of counselling and psychotherapy. For in that context (with the important exception of group therapy) change happens in private. Client and therapist pursue this transformation in the seclusion of the counselling room where assurances of confidentiality promise a very tightly protected privacy.

Communal change

Compared to this privatised approach to personal change, Christian thinking strikes a much more communal note. Secular ideas about change typically accent the reconfiguring of internal psychodynamics, but biblical change is very different. For in Scripture change is seen in relational terms. It involves changes in my relationship to God and changes in my relationships with my neighbours. All of which means that change in the Bible is consistently connected with the workings of a community.

Take the example of Zacchaeus. He begins the narrative in Luke 19 as a man apart. His collaboration with the Romans, and his dishonest dealings as a tax collector, have isolated Zacchaeus from his community. His lonely perch in the sycamore tree only serves to emphasise the extent of his separation.

It is especially striking, therefore, that when Jesus engages with Zacchaeus, he does so in public. Jesus doesn’t invite Zacchaeus to step aside for a private conversation. The public way Jesus calls him out of the tree ensures that the entire crowd is aware that Jesus intends to be a guest in Zaccheus’ house. Then, we learn that Zacchaeus “stood up and said to the Lord, ‘Look, Lord! Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor'” (Luke 19:8). Luke seems to be indicating that this too happens in a public context. This restitution obviously had to happen in the public realm – and one can only imagine the impact on his community of hearing Zacchaeus’ intention to make such a generous fourfold restitution to those he had cheated.

Restoration, in this case, is happening both vertically and horizontally. And the two are intertwined. The restoration to God would not have been complete without an outworking in Zacchaeus’ community. And the restoration in his community would never have happened without the new spiritual dynamic of grace in his relationship with Christ.

Our culture typically explores change in terms of internal dynamics (and we often follow suit in our churches). But biblical change is relational.

Communal change in practice

This has many implications for our approach to spiritual change and growth. Consider two.

First, we should have an instinct toward finding ways of doing conversation in community. In the role of help-giver we might ask, ‘is there someone I could take with me?’ We could also invite the person seeking help to bring someone with them. Are there appropriate ways to involve the wider church community in the process of change? There are a few caveats – such meetings can be demanding to organise and we must always be alert to power dynamics – we don’t want people to feel outnumbered or pressured by a multiplicity of voices. But, where carefully planned, the benefits of involving others are many. A second pair of listening ears and eyes sees things that we might have missed on our own. And the person seeking help is better able to explore change and growth if they can continue conversations with the friend they brought with them.

Second, it might recast our thinking about ‘dual roles’ – those situations where the person offering help and the person receiving it meet and interact in contexts other than the help-giving conversations. They meet at church – they socialise together. Formal counselling is nervous of such dual roles. But an accent on communal change might, perhaps, recast ‘the problem of dual roles’, as ‘the benefit of dual roles’. A vocational counsellor, who is typically separate from someone’s wider community, won’t feel the necessity to explore how conversations with that wider community should happen. But when help is coming from a fellow church member, it will be necessary to agree what might be said to others in the community. Such decisions need careful consideration, and sometimes high levels of privacy will need to be maintained, but exploring the degree of openness that is appropriate is invariably a helpful process.

Certain things are so ‘obvious’ in our culture that it can be almost impossible to imagine them functioning differently. Those cultural influences can also make it very hard to think about things biblically. That change should be a process which only happens in private may be one particularly important example.