During one of my more pronounced manic phases I hatched a plan to transform and empower the Church's ministry. It was based on my experience developing Luther Park at Sandpoint, our congregation's senior housing ministry. I proposed using this model as a means of fueling Church growth across the nation. Elements of the plan included:
- Initiating a new ministry based on the development of Senior Housing in conjunction with a new congregational start.
- Operating the "not for profit" senior housing, as a "for profit" enterprise, and using the revenue generated by the senior housing to support first, the new congregational start, and second, further expansion of the Church's ministry elsewhere. The proforma developed for the proposed new ministry in the Boise area projected a total of 225 units to be developed, and would in short order, when leased up, produce about a million dollars annually of positive cash flow. A significant amount.
- In addition, I envisioned a day care for the children of staff and the community to be developed as part of the ministry. It was conceived of as a quality of life issue, surrounding seniors with children, and children with seniors, and providing day care for the many staff members that would need it.
- The hopes also included a nucleus of multicultural ministry, as many of the staff would likely come from the Hispanic population in the area.
- And finally, and most importantly, I envisioned this model as being capable of duplication throughout the country and offering to the Church a means of self supporting mission expansion.
This entrepreneurial approach to ministry had its merits. I was able to sell the idea to the powers that be, enough so to get the Church to purchase the land for the development.
What went wrong?
The damn economy collapsed. Non-recourse financing, upon which the project was conceived, ceased to be available. Projects that used to be financeable based on their own merits now required considerable 'skin in the game' by the parent organization, including both collateral and the ability to back the loan. And the market shrank for senior housing with the collapse of the housing bubble. Thankfully, the millions of dollars that were spent will in time, be recoverable. At least I hope so.
At the other end of the spectrum one can get locked into a depressed resignation to the way life is and become convinced that nothing can be done to change the outcome. Depression. Pessimism.
There is a danger of falling victim to that in my current call. The congregation I'm serving has, for a variety of reasons, experienced a decline in membership and worship attendance over the last few decades. It is at the point that if we lose a member, the budget needs to be reworked. We're that close to the line.
What can we do? I fight the tendency to resign myself to a belief that there is nothing we can do. We are victims of the drift in our society toward a secularism that excludes involvement with the Church, and that social trend is not going to be reversed by any effort on our part. OK, so is that depression or honesty that results in such thoughts?l
The truth is that the sociological and demographic shifts in our country are real and profound. It's not just one congregation that is declining. Across every denomination in the country the experience is being shared by congregation after congregation. As much as I'd like to believe otherwise, posting my sermons on Facebook and boosting them throughout the community is not likely to alter the current trend in our nation. Would that I be so profound and gifted to do that. I'd write a book and retire.
Unbridled optimism. Depressed resignation. Polar opposites. Bipolar thought patterns.
Somewhere in the middle there is a balance that represents a healthy, realistic, world view.
Every journey begins with one step. Current trends will not continue forever.
Perhaps the healthy balance is to forge a middle ground between 'you can change the world', and 'there's nothing you can do', toward an outlook that simply affirms that 'you can make a difference'.
I think that is what I currently desire more than anything else. Simply to make a difference. This happens one person at a time. Tom Cable of the Seattle Seahawks made the observation regarding Thomas Rawls, one of the Seahawk's running backs that "you can't become a thousand yard rusher on a single play". Success as a running back involves slogging it out a few yards at a time. And repeating that.
Pentecost was a miracle. Three thousand baptisms in one day. Billy Graham would have been proud. We have had one adult baptism this last year in our congregation. One person who was adopted through baptism as a child of God. That's one person more than no persons. One step in the right direction.
I have found hope, and I believe a healthy balance, in the agricultural images for the life cycle of the Church. There is a time for tilling. A time for planting. A season of growth. And a time of harvest.
Now this is the thing. If you try to harvest the corn on the 4th of July you are going to be disappointed. "Knee high by the 4th of July" means, among other things, that there will not be any cobbs until later. I have come to believe deeply that we are at a time of tilling and planting in the Church, not a time of harvest. "It's springtime in America" is not a pessimistic statement. But springtime is not harvest time.
In the midst of all this a bipolar person does well to retrain those thought patterns. Life is lived best in the middle ground between the polar opposites. Sober optimism. Realistic hope. Achievable ambition. Making peace with the tension between mania and depression. This is not a lukewarm existence. It is neither static nor explosive. It is not a lifeless equilibrium.
You can change the world make a difference.
And making a difference, however small, is sufficient.
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