‘Nostalgia is not a strategy’

In Prime Minister Mark Carney’s famous Davos address, he offered up a phrase that deserves reflection beyond its political moment: “Nostalgia is not a strategy.”

For churches shaped by deep memory and long tradition, the line names a familiar temptation: the quiet drift from faithful remembrance into paralyzing idealization. That is, trying to do what you used to do in order to achieve success.

The impulse to replicate “the good old days” is natural for Christians because the Church is, by nature, a remembering people. Scripture repeatedly commands God’s people to recall his mighty acts, to rehearse his faithfulness and to pass the faith on from one generation to the next. The Reformed tradition has taken this call seriously through confessions, catechisms, liturgies and careful stewardship of its theological inheritance. Forgetting the past is not faithfulness; it is spiritual amnesia.

Selective memory

Yet Scripture also warns that sometimes remembrance can quietly distort. Israel’s longing to return to slavery in Egypt while in the wilderness was an unhealthy nostalgia. What God had redeemed them from became, in their imagination, a preferable future. Untethered from discernment, their memories caused resistance to God’s present leading.

Churches can fall into the same pattern. Seasons of vitality – full sanctuaries, cultural influence, familiar programs and shared assumptions – are remembered rightly, but then elevated as the standard for what faithfulness must look like going forward. The past becomes something to preserve rather than a guide that sends us forward.

‘Always reforming’

The Reformed tradition offers a necessary corrective: “ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda,” meaning “the Church reformed and always reforming.” This is not a call to novelty, instability or theological drift. It is a confession that while the gospel itself remains unchanging, the Church’s forms, habits and expressions must continually be brought under the searching light of God’s word as circumstances change.

This is where careful theological discernment is required. To say that a church, Christian organization or denomination must adapt is not to suggest that everything inherited is disposable. The gospel itself – the good news of Christ crucified and risen, the authority of Scripture, the means of grace and the core commitments of the faith – must never be treated as negotiable. These are not cultural artifacts; they are gifts entrusted by God to his people.

What may need to change are the forms, assumptions and cultural arrangements that once served those truths but no longer do so in the same way. Reform, rightly understood, preserves the substance of the faith even as it revises the vessels that carry it. The aim is not relevance for its own sake, but renewed faithfulness in a changed world.

Scripture itself models this dynamic. God identifies himself as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob – anchoring his people firmly in history – yet declares through the prophet Isaiah, “See, I am doing a new thing.” Continuity and reform are not opposites. Together, they are signs of a living faith responding obediently to a living God.

Faith looks forward

For churches and Christian organizations today, the question is not whether our history and prior behaviours matter; they do. The question is whether we will allow the past to inform us without imprisoning us. Nostalgia looks backward for confidence. Faith looks forward in trust, shaped by memory but energized by hope.

If nostalgia is not a strategy, neither is reckless innovation. But faith-filled reform – rooted in Scripture, informed by tradition, and attentive to present realities has always been the Church’s calling. Honouring the past means letting it propel us toward fresh obedience, so that the same enduring gospel may be faithfully proclaimed in a world that has changed, yet still stands in need of Christ.