I was wrong about church buildings

Found this interesting article in Leadership online from Dan Kimball about using buildings missionally. 

They can be outposts of mission, not just a drain on resources.
Dan Kimball

Sunday, November 29, 2009

If you had asked me eight years ago what I thought about church buildings, I would have said, "Who needs a building? The early church didn't have buildings, and we don't need them either!" But I was wrong.

My anti-building phase was a reaction to having seen so much money spent on church facilities, often for non-essential, luxury items. I was also reacting to a philosophy of ministry that treated church buildings like Disneyland; a place consumers gather for entertainment. But these abuses had caused me to unfairly dismiss the potential blessing of buildings as well.

Consider the building occupied by Compassion International in Colorado Springs. It has a well-groomed lawn with sprinkler system, an attractive sign, and an expansive parking lot. It's a nice facility. But it's more than just a building—it is the headquarters and training center for a ministry that brings physical and spiritual nourishment to more than one million children in 25 countries. The Compassion building is used for a missional purpose, not simply as a place for Christians to gather and consume religious services.

When we planted our church in 2004, we needed a place to meet. We found a very traditional church building that had a sizable "fellowship hall" originally used only for donuts and coffee on Sundays. Wanting to use the building differently, we converted the fellowship hall into a public coffee lounge featuring music and art from the outside community. The Abbey, as it's now called, is open seven days a week and offers free internet access.

Just yesterday I was in The Abbey and saw about 20 people, not part of our congregation, studying and hanging out. (During finals week I counted 90 students packed into the place.) While there I talked to a brand new Christian who has been coming to our gatherings. He found out about our church from a Buddhist friend. His friend loves coming to The Abbey and recommended our church because he trusted us.

We've also used our building to serve our community in times of crisis. When wildfires forced nearby residents to flee their homes, our building became an overnight refuge for those without a place to stay.

These missional opportunities would not be possible without a building.

What about the sanctuary? When we first got the building, one person said the sanctuary "looked like a funeral parlor." We sought to remake the worship space to express our congregation's values of community, worship, and service.

First, we removed the pews. Looking at the back of peoples' heads simply didn't communicate our values of community and participation.

We also invited local artists to create images during our worship gatherings. These were then displayed in the space.

The only cross in the building was very small, so we brought in a huge iron cross as the visual focus of our worship space. This clearly communicated that Christ was at the center of our mission.

We lowered the large wooden pulpit in order to facilitate more relational teaching, and we added a prayer shawl over the podium to reinforce our frequent talks about the importance of prayer in changing lives.

Little by little the space that had been powerfully missional in the 1930s and '40s was transformed to reflect missional values of the 21st century. In 20 years I'm sure the way these values are expressed will have changed again, and I hope the design of the sanctuary and fellowship hall will change accordingly.

What's important is that our mission drives our aesthetics and our use of space.

Today I am incredibly thankful we have a building. It allows us meet in larger groups for worship, and it allows for training classes that equip people for mission. We also use our space all week and welcome the public into it.

So, I have recanted from my earlier belief that buildings drain resources and create consumer Christians. I was wrong. Now I see them as missionary centers to impact lives for the gospel.

So here is my question and assignment for you.  If you had the opportunity to have a building or you already own a building, what types of things could you or do you do to use the building missionally and to not be a drain on resources.  If you could design a building anyway you want to be a missional center, what would you do?  What creative ways could you fund the designing of the space? Let me know your thoughts about the article and the questions.

Letter to Non-Believers by Shane Claiborne

Just stumbled across this awesome article written by Shane Claiborne on the Esquire website.  It is a great read and worth your time. 

What If Jesus Meant All That Stuff?

This radical Christian's ministry for the poor, The Simple Way, has gotten him in some trouble with his fellow Evangelicals. We asked him to address those who don't believe.

By Shane Claiborne

The Simple Way

To all my nonbelieving, sort-of-believing, and used-to-be-believing friends: I feel like I should begin with a confession. I am sorry that so often the biggest obstacle to God has been Christians. Christians who have had so much to say with our mouths and so little to show with our lives. I am sorry that so often we have forgotten the Christ of our Christianity.

Forgive us. Forgive us for the embarrassing things we have done in the name of God.

The other night I headed into downtown Philly for a stroll with some friends from out of town. We walked down to Penn's Landing along the river, where there are street performers, artists, musicians. We passed a great magician who did some pretty sweet tricks like pour change out of his iPhone, and then there was a preacher. He wasn't quite as captivating as the magician. He stood on a box, yelling into a microphone, and beside him was a coffin with a fake dead body inside. He talked about how we are all going to die and go to hell if we don't know Jesus.

Some folks snickered. Some told him to shut the hell up. A couple of teenagers tried to steal the dead body in the coffin. All I could do was think to myself, I want to jump up on a box beside him and yell at the top of my lungs, "God is not a monster." Maybe next time I will.

The more I have read the Bible and studied the life of Jesus, the more I have become convinced that Christianity spreads best not through force but through fascination. But over the past few decades our Christianity, at least here in the United States, has become less and less fascinating. We have given the atheists less and less to disbelieve. And the sort of Christianity many of us have seen on TV and heard on the radio looks less and less like Jesus.

At one point Gandhi was asked if he was a Christian, and he said, essentially, "I sure love Jesus, but the Christians seem so unlike their Christ." A recent study showed that the top three perceptions of Christians in the U. S. among young non-Christians are that Christians are 1) antigay, 2) judgmental, and 3) hypocritical. So what we have here is a bit of an image crisis, and much of that reputation is well deserved. That's the ugly stuff. And that's why I begin by saying that I'm sorry.

Now for the good news.

I want to invite you to consider that maybe the televangelists and street preachers are wrong — and that God really is love. Maybe the fruits of the Spirit really are beautiful things like peace, patience, kindness, joy, love, goodness, and not the ugly things that have come to characterize religion, or politics, for that matter. (If there is anything I have learned from liberals and conservatives, it's that you can have great answers and still be mean... and that just as important as being right is being nice.)

The Bible that I read says that God did not send Jesus to condemn the world but to save it... it was because "God so loved the world." That is the God I know, and I long for others to know. I did not choose to devote my life to Jesus because I was scared to death of hell or because I wanted crowns in heaven... but because he is good. For those of you who are on a sincere spiritual journey, I hope that you do not reject Christ because of Christians. We have always been a messed-up bunch, and somehow God has survived the embarrassing things we do in His name. At the core of our "Gospel" is the message that Jesus came "not [for] the healthy... but the sick." And if you choose Jesus, may it not be simply because of a fear of hell or hope for mansions in heaven.

Don't get me wrong, I still believe in the afterlife, but too often all the church has done is promise the world that there is life after death and use it as a ticket to ignore the hells around us. I am convinced that the Christian Gospel has as much to do with this life as the next, and that the message of that Gospel is not just about going up when we die but about bringing God's Kingdom down. It was Jesus who taught us to pray that God's will be done "on earth as it is in heaven." On earth.

One of Jesus' most scandalous stories is the story of the Good Samaritan. As sentimental as we may have made it, the original story was about a man who gets beat up and left on the side of the road. A priest passes by. A Levite, the quintessential religious guy, also passes by on the other side (perhaps late for a meeting at church). And then comes the Samaritan... you can almost imagine a snicker in the Jewish crowd. Jews did not talk to Samaritans, or even walk through Samaria. But the Samaritan stops and takes care of the guy in the ditch and is lifted up as the hero of the story. I'm sure some of the listeners were ticked. According to the religious elite, Samaritans did not keep the right rules, and they did not have sound doctrine... but Jesus shows that true faith has to work itself out in a way that is Good News to the most bruised and broken person lying in the ditch.

It is so simple, but the pious forget this lesson constantly. God may indeed be evident in a priest, but God is just as likely to be at work through a Samaritan or a prostitute. In fact the Scripture is brimful of God using folks like a lying prostitute named Rahab, an adulterous king named David... at one point God even speaks to a guy named Balaam through his donkey. Some say God spoke to Balaam through his ass and has been speaking through asses ever since. So if God should choose to use us, then we should be grateful but not think too highly of ourselves. And if upon meeting someone we think God could never use, we should think again.

After all, Jesus says to the religious elite who looked down on everybody else: "The tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the Kingdom ahead of you." And we wonder what got him killed?

I have a friend in the UK who talks about "dirty theology" — that we have a God who is always using dirt to bring life and healing and redemption, a God who shows up in the most unlikely and scandalous ways. After all, the whole story begins with God reaching down from heaven, picking up some dirt, and breathing life into it. At one point, Jesus takes some mud, spits in it, and wipes it on a blind man's eyes to heal him. (The priests and producers of anointing oil were not happy that day.)

In fact, the entire story of Jesus is about a God who did not just want to stay "out there" but who moves into the neighborhood, a neighborhood where folks said, "Nothing good could come." It is this Jesus who was accused of being a glutton and drunkard and rabble-rouser for hanging out with all of society's rejects, and who died on the imperial cross of Rome reserved for bandits and failed messiahs. This is why the triumph over the cross was a triumph over everything ugly we do to ourselves and to others. It is the final promise that love wins.

It is this Jesus who was born in a stank manger in the middle of a genocide. That is the God that we are just as likely to find in the streets as in the sanctuary, who can redeem revolutionaries and tax collectors, the oppressed and the oppressors... a God who is saving some of us from the ghettos of poverty, and some of us from the ghettos of wealth.

In closing, to those who have closed the door on religion — I was recently asked by a non-Christian friend if I thought he was going to hell. I said, "I hope not. It will be hard to enjoy heaven without you." If those of us who believe in God do not believe God's grace is big enough to save the whole world... well, we should at least pray that it is.

Your brother,

Shane

So what are your thoughts about this letter from Shane?  Let me know.

The Justice Project

I just finished reading "The Justice Project" edited by Brian McLaren and others.  I received the book a few weeks ago from the Ooze Viral Bloggers and it took me a while to work through it because of my schedule over the last few weeks, with work for Veritas, my job at Starbucks, and watching the kids while Kim has been working more hours.  So it has taken me some time to get around to blogging about this book. 

The book is divided into five sections.  The five sections are:  The God of Justice, The Book of Justice, Justice in the USA, A Just World, and a Just Church.  Each section then is broken down into a number of chapters each written by a different person, each writing about a different aspect of justice. 

The first section regarding the God of Justice is all around God's heart for the needy, the poor, and the oppressed.  The second section revolves around how the theme of justice runs throughout all of Scripture, from the prophets, to the Gospels, and the rest of the New Testament.  The third section revolves around issues of Justice in the USA, including Racial issues, elections, liberals, conservatives, family values, and border issues.  A Just world revolves around issues that are broader than just the USA and includes chapters on becoming just global citizens, business of justice, just ecology, just religion, just cities, justice in the slums, and justice in the suburbs.  The final section deals with Justice in the church and includes evangelicals awakening to the justice issue, planting justice churches, parenting and justice, and some other issues.

It was a great read and opened my eyes to some justice issues that I hadn't thought about before.  It also helped formulate some other things that I have been thinking about for awhile. One chapter that stood out to me was the chapter on parenting and justice.  I have thought about how can Kim and I parent Kaiden and Trinity in such a way that they have a heart to work for peace and justice in the world.  That is alot of the reason that we do service projects at Veritas with whole families, so the kids can realize that they bring a real contribution to the church and the world.

Here are some quotes that stood out to me throughout the book:

"The practice of justice is at the center of God's purpose for human life.  It is so closely related to the worship of the living God as the only ture God that no act of worship is acceptable to him unless it is accompanied by concrete acts of justice on the human level."

"In The Politics of Jesus, Dr. Obery Hendricks underscores this point by putting the Lord's Prayer in the political context of Caesar's empire in order to shed new light on its seditious and subversive nature."

"Jesus inaugurates God's realm of justice on and for the earth.  His entire life, death and resurrection unveil for all people in all times a true portrait of God's justice.  Justice empowers the wronged by making wrongs right.  Jesus' teaching and ministry shows us waht justice looks like in every dimension of human life- individual, social and economic."

"Christ's peaceable kingdom will only materialize in the Americas as emerging Christian communities disrupt the logics of racism, nationalism, materialism, and militarism and form counter-imperial communities of justice and hope."

Probably the one quote that stood out to me in the entire book was this one, and I end this blog with this one, "Too many Bible readers have been trained, as I was, to approach the biblical text through the priestly lens, not the prophetic one.  That is, they look at the priestly theme of personal justification and ignore the prophetic theme of social justice.  They're concerned about pleasing God with personal piety rather than public policy.  They are more interested in being blessed than in being a blessing, quicker to bomb their enemies than to love and serve them, more preoccupied with evading justice than with seeking it first."

Veritas Service Sunday

Here are some pictures that were taken yesterday during our Veritas Service Sunday where we raked leaves at the Union Meeting House and the park by Riverview Elementary school.  It as a beautiful day to be out blessing organizations within Marietta.  It was fun to spend the time together with others from Veritas.  All in all it was a great day to work on being a blessing to the community in which we find ourselves. 

Child Like Faith- Veritas Kids Video

Here is a video that Chris Tress (a Core Group member) produced for our worship gathering on Sunday November 8 related to our series "We have questions, so did they."  In this worship we talked about Child Like faith so we asked our Veritas Kids some questions about God, and here are their responses.