Those who have followed the recent local election news will have seen the barnstorming results for Reform. However you cut it, this is a major step forward for them as a party. It was certainly a bloody nose for both Labour – who lost a number of their councillors to them, and control of one council – as well as the Conservatives, who discovered the harder right element of their support found Reform more meaningfully Conservative (as they judge Conservatism) than the party that bears the name and lost control of several councils to them.

I don’t intend to comment on the goodness or badness of those results. You won’t have to dig very far to take an educated guess at my feelings. You might have to dig a bit further (but there is stuff in the public domain and on this blog) to figure out what my analysis of how this came to be and what either of the major parties might need to do to rectify it (from their perspective). But I’m not going to lay out almost any of that here.

What I want to pick up on is just Reform’s tag line that they used throughout these local elections: Reform will fix it! Let’s leave aside the connotations of that particular slogan for now. What has resonated with many people is the sense in which things aren’t really working as they ought, Reform represent a change from the mainstream and so, many think, let’s try something different. In many ways, it is a protest vote. Things have no worked well for large sections of the population and here is a party, who have not been tried before, claiming to be able to do something about it. If the current set of options haven’t yielded much benefit (as some judge it), what’s to be lost trying this different lot instead?

For the most part, whilst they won a good number of council seats across the board, they have also gained overall control of 7 local councils (Durham, Derbyshire, Kent, Lancashire, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire and Satffordshire) and have also won their first mayoralty in Lincolnshire. Time will tell if Reform really are able to fix it. But they have gone from being a party of protest to now having overall control of many local councils and their own metro mayor. It will no longer be good enough to blame the others. Nor will it be good enough to acknowledge and name the problems that local people see. The real test now is whether they can actually fix any of the problems locally and whether their solutions will, indeed, be for the good of those areas. You may have your views and inclinations on that; time will ultimately tell.

My reason for writing about this isn’t to offer any political analysis. After all, I haven’t really given you any here. It is because I think there is a similar dynamic that we sometimes see in the church.

There are those who consider themselves to have the gift of discernment. That usually means they think they are able to spot issues and seem quite willing to insist they know both what they are and what ought to be done about them. Sometimes they may well be right about those things, so this isn’t me dismissing anybody who might identify issues. Indeed, we need such people. Nobody sees all things with perfect clarity and it helps when others bring what we have missed to our attention so we can deal with them.

But it is worth saying, there is a distinct difference between identifying problems from the relative comfort of not having to actually address them and actually making things better. What is more, whilst sometimes the issues that are identified are indeed real issues, those who identify them often don’t see or understand the ramifications of what would occur if we ‘fixed it’ to their liking. Sometimes the issue isn’t that those in a position to do anything do not see the consequences of a particular thing – good or bad as they may be – so much as they also see how a different approach to the issue in question will have other, more significant, impacts on other areas that would create new problems.

This is well known in the world of politics. There are no end of political issues that are not quite as simple as ‘just fixing it’. For in fixing one issue we perceive, we must also factor in all the knock-on effects of any given solution. This is the nature of political dilemmas, where whatever we might do will have a negative impact on another area. A decision must be taken, on some basis, that addresses as many of the issues as possible with the best outcomes and the least problems. Politics is, well, a political minefield!

The same issue exists in the church. Decisions must be taken and things must happen. It is almost always possible to identify sub-optimal things in the church. It is also quite easy to become irritated by them and wonder why the leadership don’t just fix the problem. Sometimes it may be they don’t see it. Sometimes it may be they cannot see how to fix it at all. Other times, they may well see it but recognise if they ‘fix it’ in the way requested, it will cause a series of other issues the effects of which would be far worse. It is an ever-present problem in any organisation. It is why we have to understand our priorities, focus our attention on what serves them and order the rest around them.

But it is worth just considering the next time we identify an issue in our church. I suspect there are few who move from the pews to being an elder who don’t suddenly gain a more fulsome understanding of quite how wide-ranging and interconnected various problems are in the church. None of that is to say we don’t want people who can identify the issues. We need such people. It is just to say that sometimes identifying problems, naming them and recognising a solution that might fix the immediate issue doesn’t always ‘work’ because of the implications that solution will have on the other interconnected areas of what we do.

Reform are about to find that out politically; churches (and those who move into leadership roles) soon find it out too.