Loving Your Facility

It's right there in the heart of my hometown, if you can call the clumsy mess of stripmalls and tarmac that comprises Annandale a "hometown."  It's a modestly-sized Baptist church, one that is both gracious and clearly working just a tiny bit to maintain its facility.  Things are neatly kept, but as with all buildings that date from fifty or sixty years ago, it feels a little worn around the edges here and there.

As I wandered in through the side door to pick up the meals I deliver on Thursdays for Meals on Wheels, I was struck by one of the good-spirited signs that someone at the church puts up everywhere.

"Welcome to a Facility," it began, and that wording stuck with me.  Not "a church."  Not "a community."  Not "a congregation."

A "facility."

Because generally speaking, when the churchy people I know think of the word facility, we associate that word with bad things.

The facility is the thing that drains our energy and our resources.  The facility is the thing that becomes the albatross around our neck, the reason we don't do mission or evangelism, the drain on our budgets and our energies.  It drains our creative energies.  It makes us frustrated.  We start to think of it as something that exists as a distraction.  A facility can be a serious pain in the [tushie.]

Yet the root of the word has to do with abilities and gifts.  It "facilitates."  It makes things possible, in the way that a servant makes things possible.  As the dictionary puts it, it "affords a convenience or service."  Or it "permits the easier performance of an action."  Better yet, it describes competence, in that it is "readiness or ease due to skill, aptitude, or practice."

Our facility should contribute to our facility, which enables us to do and to be.  It is what allows to you to have a space that is welcoming, or to engage in acts of hospitality.  It is not something we cling to, or that drains us, or that stands as a fortress in which we hide away from the Other.

Seems simple enough.  Those Baptists in Annandale certainly seem to have it down.

Echoes of Church

The Cleaners/Oil Distributor/Millinery/Baptist.

As part of a Doctor of Ministry project to explore the history of my congregation, I recently found myself digging through some fascinating background research done a decade or so ago into the history of my 150-plus year old community.  It's nifty stuff, because I love the richness of stories that echo from the past.

Part of the research included poring through a listing of all of the historic buildings in the little town of Poolesville, along with pictures and a short blurb about the provenance and use of the buildings.  Leafing through the pages, one building in particular caught my eye.

It's a yellow-painted brick building, one that sits to the left of the road as you approach the intersection of the One-Oh-Seven and Elgin from the East-South-East.  It houses a dry cleaner now, but according to the historic documents, it was not always a business.

It began as a church.

Poolesville Presbyterian

It was Poolesville's first Baptist Church, built in 1865 or so, about twenty years after the construction of my congregation's sanctuary.   It isn't, as best as I've been able to tell, the formal progenitor of the healthy and dynamic Baptist community now thriving in Poolesville.  

Having driven past it for nearly four months, I'm amazed I didn't notice the similarity.  The front facades are nearly identical, sharing that blocky, built-out-of-Lego stepped appearance.  The windows facing the street are in nearly the same position.   Peeking in to the glassed in reception area of the cleaners, you can see where the original door into the church was once large...a big church door, one that would have received worshippers before they arrived.    The two buildings are close enough in appearance to be sisters.

I couldn't help but wonder about the community that once gathered there, worshipping and praying and singing.  Back then, as the glowing ashes of the Civil War settled, these two small fellowships would have been very similar in size and dynamics, if perhaps not in the less-relevant points of theology.

Digging deeper into the history of the community, providence passed a book my way written by one of the keepers of the town lore.  I find that the Baptists who built that church began their fellowship as a tenant congregation of Poolesville Presbyterian.   When the time came to build a church of their own, they just built a slightly nicer version of the church they'd been worshipping in for a decade.

Poolesville Presbyterian has chugged along for over 150 years.  It sputtered and dimmed for a while, closing for a handful of years in the middle of the last century before re-opening.

But for the little sister Baptist church, well, faith didn't stick there long.  It ceased to be church, sometime around the turn of the last century.   By 1900, it was a millinery.  Then a fuel oil distributor.  And then a cleaner.  

Yet still, if you stand at the front of the building, there are echoes of the faith that must have started her. In the left "eye" of the facade, the topmost window still holds a little flash of color, a little twinkle of stained glass as an echo of the church that once lived and hoped and worshipped there.

Odd, how the faith in buildings can remind you of the faith of people.

Edifices

I'm not really big into sacred objects.  Stuff, even church stuff, is pretty much just stuff to me.  Objects and places migh be imbued with meaning by our memories, or they might be particularly beautiful and evoke a sense of God, but they aren't any more magickal than any other place or object.

This isn't how humans think, though.  We cling to objects and spaces.  We derive our sense of sense and value and place from them.  And that seems, at least to me, to often be one of the primary things that keeps Christians from being Christian.

Take, for instance, the ongoing arguments in my denomination about buildings and real estate.  As Presbyterians, we assume that the denomination...or, rather, the local Presbytery...owns the facilities in which we worship.  Congregations hold those facilities in trust.  It's just part of our constitution, and one of those things you consider part of the background hum of our polity.  But as we argue about the place of gayness and lesbiosity in our fellowship, many congregations that want to leave are insisting that the church buildings in which they worship are theirs.

So there are lawsuits.  And countersuits.  Over buildings.  Here, I'm just fuddled.  I'm fuddled that folks would so conflate their faith with a place that they'd want to fight for it rather than simply choosing to find another place to worship without being exposed to all those gay cooties.  I'm fuddled that Presbyteries wouldn't simply release buildings and congregations that wanted to leave our fellowship...even if the reason for the departure is flawed.  I just see no evidence of the Master's will in any squabbles over property.  You know, the whole "walk an extra mile, give them your cloak also" thing that he so annoyingly went on about, instead of shutting up and just let us have at it the way we want to.

This creates some striking ironies.  Like, say, the amicus brief filed by the Presbyterian Layman in the Indiana Supreme Court.  That organization is affirming it's legal opposition to The Presbytery of the Ohio Valley's attempt to hold on to property of a church that's separating itself from the denomination.   The Layman, as the self-appointed ultraconservative defender of all things biblically literal in my denomination, is coming in on the side of the conservative church.  This is no surprise.  Having read the brief, two things are surprising.

First, I'm not sure that in the Kingdom that Christ proclaimed mutual accountability to that Kingdom includes phrases like "Incorrectly Utilized a Hybrid Implied Trust/Constructive Trust to Divest the Title Holder of Ownership."   Yeah, we're all supposed to hold each other accountable, and we're supposed to prophetically critique the powers around us, but...really?  This isn't God talk, unless the Kingdom is a whole bunch more tedious than I've hoped.  It's the church, dabbling in the law.

Second, the brief asserts that the courts are inappropriately intervening in religious practices.  This is...well...silly.  Filing a brief means you're engaging with the secular system of justice.  Filing lawsuits and briefs means you've stepped outside of the boundaries of Christian faith.  As Paul laid out pretty clearly in 1 Corinthians 6, this is a Major Jesus Fail.  

"But we've been wronged!  We've been cheated!  We have to stand up for what is right!"

The Apostle anticipated that bared-canine churchmonkey-argument, and says as clear as crystal that this is a sign that the Accuser has already won.  It is better to let the things of this world go than to fight over them.  If things and places become the things that possess us, then the grace that should define us dies.

Anyone who claims to be a Christian should know this.

First Presbyterian Church of Nowhere

In a conversation with one of my church folk the other week, we were going over the list of primary assets of our earnest but struggling little community. For her, the A-Number-One asset was our building. It's a big and architecturally complicated modernist structure, a building most notable for not having a single right angle where the walls meet. It can be a bit disorienting for new folks. There's a sizable fellowship hall, a cavernous sanctuary, and the requisite slew of bathrooms and multipurpose midsize classrooms. If we we a community of 150-200, it might seem like an asset.

But mostly, over the course of my six years in the ministry here, it's seemed like a) a constant distraction and/or b) a serious pain in the [tushie]. The old roof that leaked had to be replaced in the first three years I was there. The insanely expensive cedar ceilings that had been made to order for the pastor who built the church proved unusually tasty for termites, and many sections of the subroofing were structurally unsound. The AC system that failed every other week needed to be replaced. Energies that desperately needed to be put into the mission of the church were slurped up by the facilities. The endowment that stands as the only reason this ministry continues was tapped, again and again, to keep the building from falling in on itself. It's a common story in struggling institutional churches, but even knowing that doesn't allow you to escape a building's gravitational pull.

This last Wednesday, our cleaning person informed me that the sanctuary stank of sulphur, a sign that either a flatulent Lucifer was paying us a visit or we had a natural gas leak. I went down into the boiler room, where the stench was overpowering. The boiler itself was struggling to light with deep thrumming gasps, as flames belched out around the sides, flickered, died, and belched out again. Emergency calls were made. Emergency kill switches were thrown. Repairs were attempted late into the evening, and a patch put into place.

This last Friday, with a bonafide blizzard bearing down on the city, the temporary patch job on the boiler failed. Again, the stench of gas. Emergency kills switches were again thrown. But though repair efforts went into the early evening, the system couldn't be safely reactivated. So with a week of freezing temperatures ahead of us, the building was without heat. Every portable heater the church owned was given to the preschool/nursery that uses our space, so that the little ones wouldn't freeze before their parents arrived to pick them up.

As we roll into this important week in the life of the church, I find myself wondering about the necessity of buildings and edifices and facilities. Most of what is important about the faith..fellowship/worship/mission/study/service...could be accomplished without a big ol' honkin' building. A collective of little house ministries could manage to get that done, with resources being poured not into building, but into mission.

Sure, a physical church makes some things easier, like hosting events or opening up space for service to the community. Food pantries and clothing closets and mentoring/support ministries really do benefit from having a facility.

Still and all, on those days when the building seems like an all-consuming vortex, I feel a teeny yearning to be the organizing pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Nowhere.