Benevolence

Ford, GM, and the Church

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Car wreckThis last week, the corporate bonds of General Motors and Ford Motor Company were reduced to junk status.

Now becoming BB-rated or worse doesn't mean a company is about to go bankrupt. That said, having the bonds of two of America's largest companies reduced to junk status should give us pause.

I tend to carp on business issues here at Cerulean Sanctum, but for good reason. When people lose jobs, the Church in this country handles it terribly. Every family in a church needs an income. Many people in our churches spend more time at their jobs than anything else they do in a week, yet the Church in America's silence on the business world is deafening.

So why are churches not preparing for the next economic downturn? What do we have in place to ensure every family within our churches will be taken care of should financial disaster hit? Time and again I look around and see blissful ignorance rather than a discerning of the times. It's as if we can't possibly bring ourselves to mention the 800 lb. gorilla in the room lest it tear us to pieces. That kind of Pollyanna-ish thinking is not the wisdom of serpents, but of doves. The way I read the Bible, that's not what it says in Matthew 10:16. Too often the children of this world are more shrewd than the children of God. This should never be the case.

So we twiddle our thumbs and rest contented in our lack of preparedness to deal with bad economic times. It was only recently that we had a prolonged economic downtown. Half the people I know lost their jobs in that time, including both my wife and me. The number one prayer request in the church we attended at that time was for jobs, and yet the church did little to address the need.

Listen, God can take care of the widows and orphans on His own if He wants to. But He chose the Church to be His means of grace to those unfortunates. The Church needs to always have a way in place for whatever need is out there. And again, there is no more pressing need than for people to have jobs, or in lieu of this, have people who will draw alongside the unemployed, help them find work, or take care of their financial burden when there is no work to be found.

There is no reason why your church does not know where you work. There is no reason why your church has not identified individuals within your congregation who can make employment hiring decisions. There is no reason why your church is not collecting funds to sustain families within the church during a financial crisis. There is no reason why small groups are not considering ways to support each other should some in the group lose their jobs. There is no reason to continue to ignore alternative community living that can better buffer us Christians against hard times. Yet for some reason the numbers of churches doing this is pitifully small. This is something that should be occuring in every church. Not only that, but I believe that this should extend across state lines from one church to another. If we are not networked in this way, then the area of the country that suffers the worst downturn cannot be helped by the area that stayed relatively immune from it. If things got bad in Detroit should the car industry there turn south, would we expect only Detroit-area churches to bear that burden?

The Church of Jesus Christ should always be on the crest of the wave, not floundering in the backwash. We need sober-minded people to start working out these issues in every church in this country. Not only will we benefit those within our congregations by doing this, but as the supposed "ants" of this world, we must have a better answer for the unsaved "grasshoppers" out there than "Tough luck."

The Church shines brightest in the darkest times. Are we ready to shine that light?

The Anti-Church

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This last weekend I was talking with folks concerning some of the issues I’ve raised in my posts on the Church and work when someone mentioned an issue that had come up in his former church, a good-sized, Midwest congregation.

It seems two families got hit particularly hard by downsizing, putting their incomes in such dire straits that they were threatened with the loss of their homes. When they approached the church for help, they were told nothing could be done. The kicker was the church was in the process of buying an $80,000 sound system. The kicker for those families was that they eventually did lose their homes.

Yet, nothing could be done.

Let me say this: When you love a 64-track digital mixing board more than your brothers and sisters in Christ, you are not the Church. When folks in the congregation spend more time debating whether or not they’ll sign up for the ten channel package of satellite HDTV rather than the twenty channels of programming when all the while your sister in Christ is going to lose her home, you are not the Church.

I am absolutely sick of hearing these kinds of stories. There is never any reason for them to exist. I don’t want to hear about our concern for the lost if we have no concern for them once they are no longer lost. The Church does not stop being the Church once a person gets baptized. We talk and talk and talk about community and love and all sorts of warm fuzzy concepts, but if I see my brother in need and do not do what I can to help, then I am no longer the Church, but a rugged individualist who believes that God helps those who help themselves and can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. If you can point to the chapter and verse that supports that kind of thinking, then I’ll recant, but you simply won’t because it is not the Gospel.

How many of you are sick and tired of playing “church”? Frankly, I’ve had it. Meanwhile, the thief who comes to steal and destroy robs one family after another, families who thought they were surrounded by love, but were in fact only surrounded by theories and nice ideas.

This is only going to get worse, folks. If you are like me, I would challenge the leadership of your church on these kinds of issues. And while we can think globally and worry about someone on the other side of the planet, if we can’t deliver on helping the people we meet together with every Sunday, how can we ever hope to make a difference to the world? We can’t let the Church become some glib, but pale, imitation of itself or else we have become the Anti-Church.

God forgive us for letting it get this far!

Work (and Everyday Life) Redeemed

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In my exploration of why men are missing from the Church (see “The Church’s Missing Men“), I touched on the issue of work, showing how the intersection of work life and everything not work is simply not occurring in a reasonable way with many men. Church and parachurch organizations heap increasing loads of requirements on men already burdened with record levels of work time as they strive to avoid the next downsizing.

The Church must find a way to shield men from having to bear this burden alone. It must find ways to free men—and women for that matter—from their time traps, giving them the time they need to do all the things that are asked of them.

One way to break this cycle of pressure is to rethink community and work, two profoundly important issues the Church in America is not addressing well. The early Church provides insight here:

And all who believed were together and had all things common. And they sold their possessions and goods and distributed them to all, according as anyone had need. And continuing with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, they shared food with gladness and simplicity of heart, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to the church daily those who were being saved. (Acts 2:44-47)

I believe that we in the Church are suffering from a massive overload of duplication. Each of us has become a little island unto ourselves (families, too) and it results in an astonishing amount of wasted time and money.

My own family’s situation is informative. I live in a rural area. My neighbors and I all have some decent-sized acreage. To handle this, each one of us has a farm-sized tractor. I use my tractor about once a week. The rest of the week, it sits in my pole barn. My property has a couple hedges on it. Since they are large, they need a good trimmer to keep them in shape. I trim them a few times a season. Since I didn’t have a cordless hedge trimmer, I went out and bought one. Now it hangs in my pole barn 362 days a year, rusting.

Every day, I prepare dinner for three people. Then I clean up that meal. Meal prep, shopping for the food, and cleaning up afterwards consumes a considerable amount of time every day. And this is repeated three times a day, every day.

When I go to the market, I pay for various items of food. That food incurs a markup consisting of money above the cost of production. In the grand scheme of things, that markup is money that I have essentially “lost” to the market.

Goods are not the only things that are infrequently shared: I have practical skills and so does my neighbor, yet rarely do we call on each other for those skills.

What I am getting at here is that we in the Church are doing a very poor job of handling the money, time, and skills God has given us. Everyone in every church across the land duplicates effort every day at an enormous cost of keeping each family’s little island an island.

When we talk about community in the Church, we simply do not understand what is at stake. As long as I have been a believer, I have seen all kinds of communities, but very little community. Our lack of reliance on God (since we usually have cash to pay for anything that faith would ordinarily cover) translates into a lack of reliance on others within the Body of Faith.

We do not see how pressing the need for real community is. I believe the Church has to start girding itself. I think that tax exemption for churches is going to go away sooner than we think and a lot of worshiping bodies are going to find a financial millstone—their church building—around their necks. There is no reason to believe that the next time the economy tanks we won’t see the same layoff situation that plagued millions during this last downturn. In fact, those cycles of boom and bust may become more frequent, with the busts outlasting the booms each time.

To this, the Church must have viable solutions that address the real needs of real families. The answer must come from our living out a vital community.

I think that we need to start encouraging sets of four to six families to start living in little sub-neighborhoods, either within an existing community or by building one together. A mature group of Christian families could buy a large plot of farmable land, build a few decent-sized houses and a common building, and live together in community, replicating the pattern across a metroplex.

In the planning stages for the community, families could work to combine sets of skills so that certain members of the community would work in “regular” jobs, some would farm the land, others would take care of the kids and teach them; with this, the duplicate items, time, and effort could be eliminated. Meals could be shared in the common building and cooked on a rotating basis or, if agreed to, by whomever wants to do the cooking all the time. Each family would have an agreed upon amount of money for its own needs, but also contribute to a common pot that would be used not only as a “tithe”, but also to buffer the community itself in the event that people lose jobs (and also to help fund the farming and the family, or families, that perform that role within the community.)

In these communities, money could be saved by eliminating duplicate items. Fewer vehicles would be needed. Childcare is concentrated and homeschooling materials are not duplicated. No need for each family to have items that sit and gather dust—everyone can use them. Having the agriculturally productive land helps feed everyone in the community and the overflow of that can be brought into the larger church community. (It also helps if food distribution gets dicey some day through terrorist attacks, persecution of believers, or other disaster-related events.) A variation on this would be to have a community of all farmers supporting a community of all city workers and vice versa, though there might be distance issues to work out.

Families in our churches struggle needlessly because they are attempting to be islands. The amount of money alone that can be saved would be extraordinary. We could all live with less and be happier. The buffers for those who get down on their luck would actually work, rather than being merely talked about. And most of all, I truly believe that such communities would not only dramatically lessen the amount of time each of us spends each day rushing from place to place doing work to keep our island an island, but I think that this would free people to do the one thing none of us seems to be doing very well: taking the necessary time to draw near to God.

We’ve ratcheted everything up tighter than a watchspring and we cannot keep on jogging on a speeding treadmill without an imminent collapse. The Church has got to find ways to live in real community and also solve the problem of the increasingly frenetic job world if we are to be what Jesus intended us to be.