People are highly resistant to change, all of us in ministry know it.  But did you know that people resist change even when their own health is at stake? 

What if you were given that choice? For real. What if it
weren’t just the hyperbolic rhetoric that conflates corporate
performance with life or death? Not the overblown exhortations of a
rabid boss, or a maniacal coach, or a slick motivational speaker, or a
self-dramatizing chief executive officer or political leader. We’re
talking actual life and death now. Your own life and death. What if a
well-informed, trusted authority figure said you had to make difficult
and enduring changes in the way you think, feel, and act? If you
didn’t, your time would end soon–a lot sooner than it had to. Could
you change when change really mattered? When it mattered most?

Yes, you say?
Try again.
Yes?
You’re probably deluding yourself.
That’s what the experts say.
They say that you wouldn’t change. 

Don’t believe it? You want odds? Here are the odds that the experts
are laying down, their scientifically studied odds: nine to one. That’s
nine to one against you. How do you like those odds?

So if people are highly unlikely to change when their own life is at stake, how will be possibly get them to change the way they approach an issue at our churches? 

More on resistance to change…

Then the really shocking news was presented by Dr. Edward Miller,
dean of the medical school and chief executive officer of the hospital
at Johns Hopkins University. He talked about patients whose arteries
are so clogged that any kind of exertion is terribly painful for them.
It hurts too much to take a long walk. It hurts too much to make love.
So surgeons have to implant pieces of plastic to prop open their
arteries, or remove veins from their legs to stitch near the heart so
the blood can bypass the blocked passages.

The procedures are traumatic
and expensive–they can cost more than $100,000. More than one and a
half million people every year in the United States undergo coronary
bypass graft or angioplasty surgery at a total price of around $60
billion. Although these surgeries are astonishing feats, they are no
more than temporary fixes. The operations relieve the patients’ pain,
at least for a while, but only rarely–fewer than 3 percent of the
cases–prevent the heart attacks they’re heading toward or prolong
their lives. The bypass grafts often clog up within a few years; the
angioplasties, in only a few months.Knowing

Knowing these grim statistics, doctors tell their patients: If you
want to keep the pain from coming back, and if you don’t want to have
to repeat the surgery, and if you want to stop the course of your heart
disease before it kills you, then you have to switch to a healthier
lifestyle. You have to stop smoking, stop drinking, stop overeating,
start exercising, and relieve stress.

But very few do.

So…what do we do?  How is hope for change born?  The solution, relate, relate, relate.

You form a new, emotional relationship with a person or community that inspires and sustains hope.
If you face a situation that a reasonable person would consider
"hopeless," you need the influence of seemingly "unreasonable" people
to restore your hope–to make you believe that you can change and expect
that you will change. This is an act of persuasion–really, it’s
"selling." The leader or community has to sell you on yourself and make
you believe you have the ability to change. They have to sell you on
themselves as your partners, mentors, role models, or sources of new
knowledge. And they have to sell you on the specific methods or
strategies that they employ.

And repeated exposure to the change agent allows for a reality to become reframed. 

This is a good read.  Check it out.

Source: http://www.fastcompany.com/articles/2007/01/change-or-die.html?partner=rss

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