The Long Arc of Transformation: Why Change Takes Longer Than You Think

By W.J de Kock, ThD
Educational Consultant to Partners in Ministry
Professor of Practical Theology at Palmer Theological Seminary of Eastern University
7-minute read 

It's an early autumn morning that can't decide what it wants to be. Humid, then cool, then a slap of wind off the bay that smells like kelp and someone's burnt toast. You're sitting in the church office with your third coffee—the one you promised yourself you wouldn't have—staring at a spreadsheet that was supposed to prove the new initiative is working. Six months in. The numbers don't lie. They just sit there, unimpressed.

Here is what nobody told you at the conference where the lights were good and the speaker had better hair: transformation in a congregation doesn't obey your Gantt chart. It doesn't care about your 90-day action plan. It operates on geological time: slow, tectonic, and maddeningly invisible until one day the whole landscape has shifted and you can't remember when it started.

Why?

Because there is a difference, a ruthless, non-negotiable difference, between change and transition. William Bridges drew this line with surgical precision: "It isn't the changes that do you in, it's the transitions. Change is situational, and transition is the psychological process people go through to come to terms with the new situation. Change is external, transition is internal."[i] Read that again. You moved the service time, restructured the board, launched the youth program. That's change. External. Easy. But the sixty-seven-year-old elder who built the old roster with his hands? He's still standing in the Neutral Zone—treading water, Bridges called it—wondering who he is now that the thing he built has been disassembled for parts.[ii]

Transition takes weeks, months, mostly years. And you cannot hurry it along any more than you can hurry grief, which is precisely what it is.

Every church, writes one practitioner, "is perfectly calibrated to produce exactly the results it is producing.”[iii] Sit with that. Your congregation isn't broken. It's calibrated—by decades of habit, relational architecture, theological muscle memory, and the specific humans who show up on Sunday. Changing the calibration requires what Carey Nieuwhof frames as the five-year rule: "Don't overestimate what you can accomplish in one year. Don't underestimate what you can do in five."[iv] His own story bears it out—three declining mainline churches, merged, renamed, sold all three buildings, grew tenfold. In five years. Not five months.

But, and here is the thing we would rather not hear, those five years include the season when nothing appears to be working. Kotter's model is honest about this. Step one alone, creating urgency, ”is probably the longest because it takes time to convince everyone of the same problem.”[v] And even once you've done that, people won't sustain the long march without "compelling evidence of results within six to eighteen months. 

While you need short-term wins , yet declare victory too soon, and you walk straight into Kotter's Step Seven trap: tradition reasserts itself like a river finding its former course, and what felt like arrival turns out to have been a rest stop.[vi] You haven't failed. You've mistaken a chapter break for the final page.

Here is where theology rescues us from management theory. St. John Henry Newman, the patron saint of those who believe that genuine transformation is both painful and necessary, wrote: "To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often."[vii] That sentence has been weaponised by progressives and conservatives alike, usually to mean my kind of change. Newman meant something stranger. He meant that doctrine itself develops—not by rupture but by the slow, mysterious logic of a living organism working out what was always latent within it. Like a mustard seed. Like yeast in dough. Like a God who hovers.

Australians know this rhythm in their bones. In 1966, Vincent Lingiari led 200 Gurindji stockmen and their families off Wave Hill cattle station in the Northern Territory — not in a blaze of revolution but in a quiet, determined walk. What began as a demand for fair wages became a nine-year struggle for the return of stolen land — the longest strike in Australian history. Nine years of camping at Daguragu, of petitions refused and promises broken, before Gough Whitlam finally poured a handful of red soil into Lingiari's outstretched palm in 1975. And even then, it took another eleven years before the Aboriginal Land Rights Act extended those rights beyond a single ceremony. Paul Kelly and Kev Carmody turned the story into something like a national hymn, “From Little Things Big Things Grow”, and the title alone is a theology of change: not overnight, not by force, but by the slow, stubborn accumulation of faithfulness. Change in Australia has always grown from little things. The church would do well to learn the song.

Merachefet.

Say it slowly. Let the Old Testament word do what it was made to do.

It is the Hebrew of Genesis 1:2 ,  the Spirit of God hovering over the formless dark, over the nothing that was not yet something. Not managing the chaos. Not fixing it. Hovering. The same verb appears in Deuteronomy when the poet pictures an eagle stirring the nest, fluttering over its fledglings — agitating them toward flight, then spreading wide to catch whatever falls.[viii] This is not a God who stands back and waits for you to get it together. This is a God who is already there, already at work, in the formlessness, before the first word is spoken, before the first day has a name.

Before your transition bears visible fruit. Before the car park empties and refills. Before the emails lose their chill. God is already there.

Now hold that image. And hold this one alongside it.

Isaiah, writing to exiles,  people who had every reason to believe that God had gone quiet , reaches for a word that we translate as wait. Qavah.[ix] But wait is too passive, too English, too much like sitting in a  waiting room with a numbered ticket and a long afternoon ahead of you. Qavah is the word for making rope. For taking hundreds of thin strands — each one easily snapped — and twisting them, braiding them, binding them together until what was fragile becomes unbreakable.³

Those who qavah the Lord shall renew their strength.

Not those who wait. Those who braid themselves into God.

This is what it means to wait in the biblical sense: not passive endurance, not the gritted-teeth stoicism that gets mistaken for faith in ministry circles. It is active, bodily, costly binding. You wrap yourself around the only thing that holds. And in the twisting , in the slow, unglamorous, often humiliating process of being wound together with something larger than your own anxious will, strength returns. Not because you summoned it. Because you stopped pretending you didn't need it.

I grew up watching men who knew how to wait, not in the English sense, but in the qavah sense. In the townships outside Cape Town, in the long years before the walls came down, there were people who had every reason for acedia, Aquinas's name for the sin I most recognise in myself and in the ministry leaders I work with. Not laziness. Not sloth. Something darker: sadness about a spiritual good.[x] The slow, creeping conviction that transformation will cost everything and yield nothing. That the arc is too long, the effort too great, the fruit too uncertain. It is the spiritual disease of people who have seen too many transitions fail, too many visions stall, too many pews empty.

It is the refusal to believe that hovering is actually doing something.

But merachefet insists otherwise. The Spirit hovers over the formless — and that hovering is already creation. Before the first word is spoken, something is already happening in the dark. The eagle's agitation is not impatience; it is preparation. The braiding is not delay; it is the work itself.

And this is the peculiar grace of the in-between season: that what looks like nothing from the outside, the slow, boring, unglamorous work of showing up, asking the question, waiting for the answer, tending the conditions, is, from another angle entirely, the Spirit at work. Hovering. Braiding. Preparing a first day.

Whether you can see it yet or not.

[i] William Bridges, Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2004).

[ii] Bridges describes the Neutral Zone as "a period of confusion and distress" where "we may feel that we are treading water, drifting aimlessly."

[iii] Ray Pritchard, "Why Churches Change So Slowly," Keep Believing Ministries (blog), September 3, 2007, 

https://www.keepbelieving.com/why-churches-change-so-slowly/.

[iv] Carey Nieuwhof, "How Long Will It Take for My Church to Really, Actually Change?," Carey Nieuwhof (blog), accessed February 22, 2026, https://careynieuwhof.com/how-long-take-church-really-actually-change/.

[v] Joe Radosevich, "Using John Kotter's Change Theory in Small Church Leadership," KarlVaters.com, December 18, 2025, https://karlvaters.com/kotters-change-theory/.

[vi] John P. Kotter, "Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail," Harvard Business Review, May–June 1995, https://hbr.org/1995/05/leading-change-why-transformation-efforts-fail-2.

[vii] John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (London: James Toovey, 1845), ch. 1, sec. 1. Available at Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/35110/35110-h/35110-h.htm.

[viii] Isaiah 40:31 (ESV).

[ix] The Hebrew qavah (קָוָה), from qav (cord, rope), carries the literal meaning of twisting or binding strands together to form rope. See BibleProject, "What Does Isaiah 40:31 Mean?" bibleproject.com, January 2025; Chaim Bentorah, "Hebrew Word Study: Waiting," chaimbentorah.com, July 24, 2019.

[x] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica II-II, q. 35, a. 1. Discussed in Fr. David Songy, OFM Cap, "Adapting to Transitions," The Priest, June 2017, 29