I've been an active person all my life, and only the typical aches and pains as I approach my 50-hood years have slowed me down. Running, cycling and racquetball have been my preferred sports since graduating from high school and college where I gleefully beat my body playing soccer and lacrosse.

I have always associated health with vigorous activity. That's why it's a little hard for my mind to wrap around the idea that yoga-type exercise is an effective health regimen. But it is.

Don't worry, I'm not promoting the mantra-chanting, chakra-aligning, mystical version that floated over to the States in the '70s and '80s. I'm just talking about the value of the slow, pretzelizing movements yoga employs. Apparently stretching counts. Increasing flexibility improves health.

In the same way, flexibility in one's Christian life and community also improves health. But flexibility does not come naturally. Just as muscular flexibility requires stretching, spiritual flexibility requires intentional exercise. Here are a few stretching exercises you can try anywhere.

The "Both-And" Bend
A common habit that leads to inflexibility is our tendency to reduce every question of belief and action to an either-or choice, as if most important decisions involve only two options. More often than not, there are many options.

For example, imagine that your pastor is very interested in your church starting a second worship service. He contends that you could reach more people if you offered a second option to potential seekers. However, you are afraid that a second service would drain away many key people from your current worship service and reduce both the attendance and enthusiasm. You're afraid that all you will wind up with are two services of barely filled sanctuaries.

In this situation, some people might see only two options. Either we have two services or only one. And then they begin to argue for one over the other: "I'm for two services!" "I'm for one service only!"

In actuality there are more than just the two options. For example, your church could enter an experimental phase for a period of six months and check the impact of going to two services before making a final leap to a new schedule. Or, your church could enlist volunteers who would attend both services for a while in order to minimize the impact of the loss of attendance in the current worship service. Or, your church could design a second service especially for a unique target population, e.g., GenXers or single working moms.

You get the point. Whenever you are considering a question that seems to place people on one of two sides of an issue, the smart thing is always to look for other options so that you can find a "both-and" solution: There must be a way to offer both a second service and minimize the impact on our current service.

The "Federal Case" Twist
Perhaps the greatest inherent danger within Christian belief is its tendency to give the impression that every question of faith and practice is a matter of life and death. No reasonable Christian really believes that projecting scripture songs on Sunday mornings rather than using hymnals will cause anyone to go to hell. The problem is that we "live and move and have our being" inside a faith context that involves very high stakes. It's hard to shift gears when one moment you're talking about people's eternal destiny and the next minute you're talking about whether the morning service should start at 10:30 or 10:45.

It's kind of like getting off the freeway after tooling along at 70 miles an hour. If you're not careful to slow down, you'll accidentally find yourself cruising along at 70 through a 35-mile-an-hour zone. You just got into that fast-paced rhythm.

Inside the high-stakes context of Christian faith there is often an intense rhythm to our deliberations. To deal with this habit of intensity you have to keep reminding yourself not to make federal cases out of things that are not that important. Whenever you find yourself really getting uptight about "how things ought to be" or "I just think this is very important" or "I don't think people care enough about …" that's exactly the time to be suspicious of your intensity. Twist your demand for agreement into a request for consideration only. Fact is, one day we will probably find out that God places very few things in the container labeled "Things to Get All Hot and Bothered About."

The Backward Flex
You may find this next exercise almost impossible to do if you are a person very oriented toward change. Believe me. I understand the problem.

My mind is almost always on the future, looking ahead to the accomplishment of some goal. Fixing problems, getting over hurdles, making changes — all come naturally to me. "Let's go, God" is my most frequent prayer.

Slow people, deliberate people, people who hang on to something that doesn't work, and people who worry about what might happen have stretched my patience to the limit hundreds of times. I have discovered that people like me who are always bending forward toward change can be very inflexible. If you give us any position of power, we have a tendency to stack the committees and the agenda so that our desired changes become the only option. It has to come out our way.

We may go through the motions of "listening," but we're not really listening. We have no intention of backing down. We're only appearing to be listening so that we can check that step off our list of "things to do" and move on. There never was any chance that those who didn't want to change would get their way.

In contrast, the backward bend is probably the healthiest exercise of all. For two years my wife and I attended an Evangelical Free church in Estes Park, CO. During that period of time the church grew from 150 to 500 and became the largest and most fruitful church in town. It all had to do with how the church started.

In the mid-'80s a group of about 40 Evangelical Free people wanted to start a church in Estes Park. They had grown tired of traveling 50 miles one way to an Evangelical Free church in Longmont, CO. By all measurements they had the makings of a very successful church - 40 highly committed, well-to-do people. Their first step was to go to the local ministerial association to lay out their plans to start a church and — get this — ask permission. "Is it OK for us to start a church or will it be an unwelcome intrusion into the community?"

Unbelievably and inappropriately the ministerial association said, "No, don't come here."

Now here comes the even more unbelievable part. These 40 people who were so eager to have a church in their hometown and who were leaning strongly toward a hopeful future submitted to the ministerial association's refusal and waited seven long years before they approached the association again and, this time, were welcomed. Seven years!

For seven years they bent over backward to the ones who were holding them back. But virtually everyone today acknowledges that their patience, humility and passion for unity in the regional body of Christ are the very things God used and shaped into the healthiest church I have ever seen.

When we see a need for change, we may not have to wait seven years. But we do have to be careful not to orchestrate or manipulate circumstances to force change upon those who are not yet ready. (I can almost hear some inflexible backs creaking just from reading these words!) Bending backward is the hardest stretch to do.
These stretching exercises — like all stretching — may initially make a person say "Ouch!" Over time, however, flexibility and health improve. Which is a good thing for people who believe much of our time should be spent bowing before God and stooping to wash feet.