About twenty years ago, I was living in the Denver area, I was still single, and I was searching for a church to attend. I looked in the phone book and picked a church I thought I might try. Since I can’t see, I called a taxi and asked the driver to take me to the address which was listed in the phone book.
When we arrived at the location, the driver informed me that nothing was there, except a vacant lot. I was going to ask him to take me home, but he called the dispatcher and asked where this church was. The dispatcher gave him a different address, and the driver took me there and dropped me off.
Once the service began, someone behind the pulpit began talking excitedly about the church’s new building, and I realized the address in the phone book was merely a faith address. I had more faith in the phone book than I should have.
The first item in the service was a special offering for the comfortable new theater chairs which were going to eventually be at their faith address. Each theater seat would cost $77, which is probably cheap by today’s standards. Since this was God’s work and God wants to grow his church, we shouldn’t just buy a chair for ourselves. We should buy ten chairs, so our unsaved friends could join us at the new faith address, and some of us could afford more than ten chairs. You can’t outgive God.
But it’s OK to send God’s people to a vacant lot. So I sat through the service, thinking about my taxi ride to nowhere and my obligation for at least $770. It occurred to me that I didn’t have to come back, and I never did. However, the new church was built, and I was later informed by one of its members that the theater seats are very nice.
Two or three years later, I met the woman who is now my wife at another Denver area church. The church was renting a meeting room in a local hotel, which was most unsatisfactory, because of the need to set up chairs every week, to bring in instruments and amplifiers, as well as putting the chairs away and removing the equipment after the service. The pastor wanted a building, and they eventually purchased one.
As everyone knows, the three most important things about a church building are location, location and location. But all the good locations were taken, and we wound up in a bad location, in a building no one would pass accidentally. The building hadn’t even been open for two months when the pastor decided to leave Colorado to go pastor a church in Oregon. The church got a new pastor. The new pastor hated the building, but he was stuck with it. The congregation was mostly single people looking for spouses, and the new pastor felt the church was too social and recreational, and not spiritual enough. So he didn’t mind very much when the single people left, because he wanted families. But no families came, and the declining attendance made it impossible to repay
the loan for the building. The new pastor left, the building was sold, and the congregation scattered. The church had other problems, but the building itself was an integral part of the church’s collapse.
A decade later, my wife and I found ourselves in metropolitan Phoenix, attending a church which wanted to expand its existing facilities. They bought some adjacent land and began a do-it-yourself project, building a new building for the church, as well as a school and classrooms. During the building project, many things the church would normally have done went without workers, including the children’s programs which my wife was responsible for. Before the building was complete, she decided she had had enough. She resigned, and we went looking for another church. One of the men who did a lot of work on the building was employed by the church. He often worked 16-hour days, and his wife was so frustrated by the end of the project that she wrote a twelve-page letter to the pastors detailing her complaints, and her family left Arizona. It didn’t help that this woman was my wife’s best friend there, and they babysat for each other.
So when it came time to choose another church, I wanted to go somewhere where I at least knew somebody, and I knew another pastor and his wife. So we changed churches. As soon as we did, the word went forth that they too need a new building. They are currently trying to borrow $2.4 million to purchase land for a facility which is supposed to cost approximately an additional $5.6 million. All $8 million would be borrowed money, and the facility may actually cost much more than $5.6 million, because building costs are skyrocketing, and the interest payments on the loans may double, triple or quadruple the real cost of this project.
The current membership of the church includes only 75 to 80 adults. Assuming 80 adults and an $8 million figure, and considering that my wife and I are two of the 80 adults, our fair share of this project would be approximately $200,000, which is more than we purchased our house for five years ago. I don’t mind being generous, but you know what they say about blood and turnips. As a matter of fairness, I acknowledge that the planning and the desire for this project predates our membership. But I don’t think the question, “Do the 80 of you want to owe $8 million?” has been asked often enough. Church members are the only people who can pay this bill, and it would be a lot of money even if the congregation were ten times as large.
Church attendance in the United States is relatively flat. In other words, most church growth comes at the expense of other churches. Of course, we don’t live in a stagnant world. The size of the congregation may change. This is God’s work after all, and the assumption is for growth. Bankers are generally not faith people, however, and they make assumptions based on current realities. Bankers like to lend money, because they are more keenly aware than most pastors are of the reality behind the Bible’s admonition:
Proverbs 22:7 “The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender.”
Church leaders say they have heard from God about this, and I hope so. But it may be that God’s counsel on this subject is found in the following passage:
Romans 13:8 “Owe nothing to anyone except to love one another; for he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law.”
I hope they get their building. I say they, because I’m not sure I want to be around for the duration of this project. Like ordinary citizens, churches have bills to pay. We are already being asked to give special offerings, beyond tithes, to support this project, which is still in its early stages. I trust the pastor not to want to put any undue pressure on people. But when the bills come due, and a lot of money is needed from a small group of people, there will be a tendency to beg more than usual for donations, and it will change the personality of the church.
The desire to acquire facilities tends to turn organized religion into a business, and I think there’s a better way of doing things. Early Christians were expelled from synagogues, and the New Testament says nothing about church buildings. All of the New Testament references to churches appear to be with regard to house churches, where Christians opened up their homes to each other. Many churches have home groups, and the home groups are the only places where people can really get acquainted and develop friendships, something which is nearly impossible in traditional Sunday morning church settings. Traditional churches regard home groups as supplemental. But I think house churches are the real church, and the traditional church is supplemental. Christians really need a cultural change, because the current culture isn’t serving us well.
I’m sure there are a million home group horror stories out there too, but I would feel much more comfortable expressing my opinion among a small circle of friends than I do speaking up as the lone dissenter in a large or medium-sized church. The issue for me is that I really want my voice to be heard about issues like this one, which tends not to happen in larger churches, yet I don’t want to create a perception that I’m leading a one-man mutiny. It would be nice to have a little more input about these decisions, but the train is already chugging down the track, and it isn’t going to turn avound for me.
