Today we start with a question. It’s something I have pondered for years, without ever quite arriving at an answer. Memory, of course, is a great gift, we simply could not exist without it. But nostalgia is something else entirely.
What is the point of our ability to look back longingly to the “golden old days”, which in truth were probably not as golden as we remember them? If we were to sit around trying to recreate the past exactly as it was, we would never move forward at all. And yet nostalgia has an extraordinary power. It can evoke memories so vivid that we could easily lose ourselves in them, if we did not have the discipline to keep moving on.
So why would we be given such a faculty?
I find myself wondering whether this is part of the reason so many churches, and even the Church as an institution, feel stuck. There is a longing for the return of the “good old days”: Sunday school anniversaries, church outings to the seaside, a time when the pews were fuller and the rhythms more familiar.
And yet those days were not without their difficulties. They were no less complex or fragile than our own. Nostalgia, its seems to me, edits the past. It softens the edges and airbrushes the tensions; and it appears to remember what comforts us while quietly forgetting what challenged us. But the fact that nostalgia exists at all suggests it has a deeper purpose than mere sentimentality.
Perhaps nostalgia is not meant to be a destination, but a threshold.
It reconnects us to something essential - belonging, meaning, shared life, simplicity, trust. Not the forms of the past, but the qualities that once flowed through those forms. When nostalgia is healthy, it is not saying “go back”, but rather is it saying “remember what mattered”.
The difficulty comes when we confuse container and content.
The church outing to the seaside was a container. What people truly long for is not the charabanc or the sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper, but the sense of shared joy, safety, and communal identity. When churches try to resurrect the container rather than re-incarnate the life that once flowed through it, nostalgia quietly shifts from teacher to tyrant.
Unexamined nostalgia freezes us. It turns the past into an idol and the future into a threat. It creates a subtle grief that whispers that God was somehow more present then than now, which is a devastating theological assumption, even if we never say it aloud.
And yet nostalgia also tells the truth about loss.
Something has changed. Cultural cohesion has thinned and shared rituals have weakened. These days time feels faster, roots feel shallower, and community is so much harder to sustain. Nostalgia then is often grief trying to speak and to deny that grief is just as dangerous as clinging to it. Perhaps the deeper question nostalgia asks is not, “How do we go back?” but rather, “What was life-giving then?”
What human need was being met? What mattered enough to linger in memory? And how might that essence be translated, instead of replicated, now? This is where the church’s stuckness becomes so revealing. When an institution longs for the past, it is often because it has not yet trusted God enough to imagine the future. Nostalgia becomes a spiritual safety blanket: familiar, comforting, and quietly suffocating.
The task before us then, personally and collectively, may be learning how to let nostalgia ripen into wisdom, rather than harden into regret.
Because the future does not need us to relive the past.
It needs us to remember why the past mattered, and then to trust that the same God is still at work — just in forms we do not yet recognise.