[This is from the Launch Plan for New Way Church in Austin, TX. Last Friday we wrapped up the Rationale section with a post on Contingencies. Today begins the People section, so tomorrow's post will be on Target Demographics.]

Interestingly, money corresponds with truth, the true spiritual wealth. And so the Lord speaks in His Word quite frequently about coins and precious metals and business practices and such.  And I wonder if the discomfort we sometimes feel in sharing our truths with those new to the church is somehow connected with our reluctance to talk about money. I haven’t sorted that out, yet, but it’s something to think about.

What I do know, though, is that the material business of performing the uses of the church and the priesthood takes a certain amount of natural wealth to accomplish. In the history of our organization we have had wealthy individuals who were moved to support the church to such a degree that the average member could contribute not a penny and the church would continue on. And now we have investment funds and endowments that likewise give the illusion that the average member’s contribution doesn’t matter. And this is really unhealthy. Across the world, tens of thousands of churches survive—and thrive!—hand-to-mouth without endowments or foundations, but somehow we have come to assume that without such things we would cease to exist. This is both false and unhealthy.

It is true that schools have different (and far larger) financial needs. But churches don’t. Churches and schools work best with very different models. (And this makes our odd situation—being a church born out of and acting more like a school—quite challenging.) What churches need is committed members who give of their time, their wealth, and their affection, on an ongoing basis, because they believe the church will be useful not to themselves, but to other people. And in doing so, they still benefit themselves. Not only do they get a church, but they get the rewarding delights that the Lord uses to encourage all charitable behavior.

[This also appears as the "Pastor's Box" in the 2009.09.14 Bryn Athyn Post.]

If a church is “working”, then its local members are actively engaged in it with their hearts and lives. The financial model of a healthy church is essentially hand-to-mouth, cash flow based, because it is a constant running reflection of the dedication and commitment of its members on the local level. And actually, this doesn’t require too much scale. So long as a congregation doesn’t get tied up in real estate, buildings, major debt, etc., a typical church can be totally self-sufficient at a fairly small size.

Schools, on the other hand, require enormous resources. The typical finanical model of a school depends on endowments and on big generous contributions from alumni 20 years after they graduate.

The General Church is a weird bird. It is a church, but because it was born out of the Academy Movement, it is structured like a school.

If I could wave a magic wand for the GC right now, I would magically transfer every last dollar of its endowment into programs that are run by and for local congregations. Then I would double the Academy’s endowment so that it can expand the college, clone the high school in multiple locations (since boarding schools are on the way out), and (most importantly) give the Theological School everything it could ever wish for. Then with my “third wish” I wouldirrevocably divide all ANC stuff from all GC stuff so the Academy schools can be schools and the Church societies can be churches.

Oh, and with my fourth wish (if I get one) I’d separately endow some of our elementary schools while simultaneously giving them separate boards from their host congregations’ boards.

That’s my business dude slash priest slash strategic analyst take on things, at any rate.

And on volunteers: they need to be listened to. AND praised. But listened to, first. The people who give their time are on the front lines of the work of the church, and often know better than anyone else what needs to happen and how it can happen. I’m all for decentralizing decision making, and listening to volunteers is a major part of doing that.

I’m babbling a bit this morning. But this is the kickoff weekend of our church’s world-wide capital campaign, and I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about what stewardship means. Somehow we got off track in our organization, a long time ago, I’m afraid. Church shouldn’t be something you attend the way you attend a benefit concert. Church is something you DO. **YOU** are the church, not we dudes in stoles.

The Writings talk about how a person more and more “becomes the church”. But somehow we’ve let it fall into something passive. Most people don’t give their time or money to the church, I think in part because it goes on without them anyway. It’s great that in the past we’ve benefitted from the generous donations of a handful–both a handful of financial donors and also of people volunteering their time. But I think it’s time to put an end to so many being served by the same old few. I don’t want to guilt trip people, here. Rather, I pray that a broader base of people this year give “giving”–both of time and of money–a try this year, and test the Lord (as he invites us to), and see how it changes not just the church, and not just the *world* (which it will), but also **themselves**.

A lot of the people reading these ramblings already know how rewarding it is to contribute back to the community we call our local church. I just wish that group experiencing this was a larger percentage of the people showing up on Sunday.

End blither.

[This is a much-expanded post, based on some thoughts I had in response to some great comments on my FaceBook page.]

But I haven’t decided which. On the one hand, there’s lots of great stuff in the Word to help with the process of forgiving. On the other hand, the Bryn Athyn Family Contemporary worship service is in serious need of a renewed vision and focus. (And this series will be happening at that service July 12, 19, and 26.)

I’m looking for help in figuring out which way to go. Forgiveness is a great general subject that lots of people want help with. A vision series for the contemporary worship service is a critical need, though.

Right now I’m leaning toward forgiveness, but can easily be swayed. Either way, both subjects need to be covered in the coming few months.

Now, I’m not a Philistine. I’m very pro-art. I have been an appreciator of fine art for most of my life. I’m just not much of a decorator. My aesthetic leans toward what I think of as a sort of Japanese/Spartan/utilitarian clean canvass approach. I love whitespace. And clear surfaces. Particularly horizontal ones. For my home office I bought an Aeron chair (an addiction I picked up during my dot com days) and a slim-lined wooden desk–more a table, really–with a black leather (or something like it) surface, and just a single thin drawer for keeping a few extra pens in. When clean (which happens now and then) the only things on top of it should be a printer, a laptop, a pen, and a bible. I luxuriate in the wide open working surface, uncluttered by doodads, knicknacks, files, books, or anything else. It has potential. And I like that.

Now, at this point, my coworkers and my wife are howling. I have a problem with generating stacks of papers and books. I seem to produce such stacks the way park statues produce bird poop. But my platonic ideal of a desk is a big blank empty clear horizontal surface that is temporarily occupied by a computer and a book or two, and then cleared off when the work is done. I guess I need to get better at filing things. I don’t have real drawers in the desk I bought, becuase I know that if I had drawers, they would become one-way dumping grounds. So for now, what I do is I use file boxes to roughly categorize all these papers. When I organize. Which is less than weekly, right now.

Anyway, the walls of my office at work have the following: one whiteboard containing my four tiered master plan for improving this church, a sticky with the word “pray” on it, one year long calendar that keeps falling down because the stupid putty that holds it up is worthless, a large printout of my faith and purpose, and the one and only piece of art I have ever purchased. The rest (which is the majority) of my wallspace is glorious white blankness. My coworkers have given up telling me I need to put stuff on the walls, but only recently.

So if I love art, and yet have only purchased one piece in all my 38 years, you can imagine that I put a lot of thought into that purchase. But if you’ve read the title of this post and are familiar with American paintings, you may be scratching your head. “All the paintings you could have purchased in the world and you chose that?” You see, in case you didn’t know, Edward Hopper’s The Nighthawks is one of the most over-displayed iconic works in all of American artistry.

Edward Hopper. The Nighthawks. Oil on canvas, 1942.

But if you get past all of the spoofs, derivative works, pop references, dorm room walls and tired cliches, and really enter into this painting, I think you will find something remarkable. After all, that’s how an image becomes a pop icon.

Before I give you my take, let me share with you what Sister Wendy (that funny wonderful nun on PBS that makes art so living and meaningful) said about this piece (as quoted in the Artchive from Sister Wendy’s American Masterpieces):

Apparently, there was a period when every college dormitory in the country had on its walls a poster of Hopper’s Nighthawks; it had become an icon. It is easy to understand its appeal. This is not just an image of big-city loneliness, but of existential loneliness: the sense that we have (perhaps overwhelmingly in late adolescence) of being on our own in the human condition. When we look at that dark New York street, we would expect the fluorescent-lit cafe to be welcoming, but it is not. There is no way to enter it, no door. The extreme brightness means that the people inside are held, exposed and vulnerable. They hunch their shoulders defensively. Hopper did not actually observe them, because he used himself as a model for both the seated men, as if he perceived men in this situation as clones. He modeled the woman, as he did all of his female characters, on his wife Jo. He was a difficult man, and Jo was far more emotionally involved with him than he with her; one of her methods of keeping him with her was to insist that only she would be his model.

From Jo’s diaries we learn that Hopper described this work as a painting of “three characters.” The man behind the counter, though imprisoned in the triangle, is in fact free. He has a job, a home, he can come and go; he can look at the customers with a half-smile. It is the customers who are the nighthawks. Nighthawks are predators – but are the men there to prey on the woman, or has she come in to prey on the men? To my mind, the man and woman are a couple, as the position of their hands suggests, but they are a couple so lost in misery that they cannot communicate; they have nothing to give each other. I see the nighthawks of the picture not so much as birds of prey, but simply as birds: great winged creatures that should be free in the sky, but instead are shut in, dazed and miserable, with their heads constantly banging against the glass of the world’s callousness. In his Last Poems, A. E. Housman (1859-1936) speaks of being “a stranger and afraid/In a world I never made.” That was what Hopper felt – and what he conveys so bitterly.

So why do I love this painting? How did it beat out several Japanese paintings I was also considering for my very first art purchase? And how did it beat out other, more suburban/rural paintings also by Hopper that I considered? In short, I see my work in this painting. This is the church. This is the world. This is evangelism.

The evangelist works, semi-trapped within the triangle, serving lonely broken people, in a brightly lit glass box, in a world of darkness. There are three kinds of loneliness here. The man sitting at the counter alone, his face unseen, is just plain alone. The couple are not just alone together, but clearly are apart from each other. And the man behind the counter is not just alone, but separated from the other lonely figures he is serving by a big wooden counter without exit. But they are all better off than if they were out in the inky city.

Now, I don’t see the world, the church and my work as a New Christian evenagelist to be so totally bleak. But this certainly captures one facet of the whole picture, as I see it. It feeds my darker side, at least. There’s a part of me that yearns for connection, but doesn’t believe in it. There’s a level at which it sometimes seems to me no human beings are able to connect. It’s that Buried Life Matthew Arnold wrote about. (My hands-down favorite poem, by the way.) But I’m also a pretty upbeat person most of the time. My dark side is the minority opinion in my head these days.

But I put the painting where I am constantly confronted by it while writing sermons, counselling people, and developing strategies, because I want the reminder. I look up and I think, “That is who I am here to serve. That is the spiritual darkness people so desparately need escape from. That is the outpost I serve in, so yeah, of course it is sometimes hard.”

We all yearn for connection at times, and most all people struggle with loneliness at one point or another. And I am convinced that the church is the best imperfect solution for this struggle. But I am also convinced that the church as it currently stands has too many barriers, too much wood and glass, and too few doors. Because there is one more lonely character in this painting. You. The observer. The person in the dark, drawn to this beacon of light, and not seeing a way in for yourself.

So what do you see in this painting? And if you had just one piece of art on display in your life, what would it be?