It has been 40 years since I fired up a wood stove. The last time was in the early 80s when our family lived in a 100-year-old ranch house in Kalispell, Montana. The house was not insulated. On cold mornings, my boots would freeze to the floor in the boot room. Our kids were little then. When they awoke in the mornings they would run downstairs and stand around our woodstove to get dressed for school. As young pastors, we didn’t have much regarding earthly wealth, but we had each other and the blessings of God. We were rich in the most important things in life.

Yesterday, I made a rookie mistake while starting the fire in our new wood stove. After I lit the fire, our living room began to fill with smoke. What I forgot was that on colder mornings a woodstove chimney fills with cold, heavy air when a fire has not been burning overnight. When the heat and smoke of a new fire starts to rise from the firebox of a woodstove, it meets a thick column of dense cold air. The smoke can’t rise until the chimney heats up so it pours back into the room where the wood stove stands.

To solve my problem, I did some research. I found out that people living in Sweden offer a sensible solution – a solution many woodstove experts are now advising. Instead of building a traditional bed of kindling at the base of a firebox and then adding progressively larger pieces of firewood topping it off with the largest logs. They reverse the order of stacking and end up having the kindling on the top of the stack of wood. This elevates the initial flame near the base of the chimney gradually warming the chimney as the fire grows in intensity pushing the column of cold air up and out of the chimney. As I write this, I am watching the flames of a smokeless fire.

My woodstove experience reaffirmed a truth about life. If something is not working, we need to find another way. It takes a bit of research, but it will pay solid dividends. Nothing is new under the sun, even for the Church. Over the course of history, someone has found a solution for the challenges we face today.

The Church stands at the crossroads of a major transition. We have stacked the materials of what we were told made for a successful representation of the Church. In many cases, the model of the Church in western culture is smoking, not burning.

I have been parked in the book of Acts trying to discover how to restack the kindling of my faith. When ignited by the Spirit, a restacked faith will be able to burn with the kind of smokeless clarity only the fire of God’s Spirit can produce.God is inviting all of us to restack our assumptions about the Church in preparation for a new future none of us has ever experienced. In some cases, a complete reversal will take place regarding how we view our finances, staffing, and facilities. These decisions will clear away the smoke of our assumptions allowing people to see a simple, yet profound vision of the Church.