Museums of Theism (Matthew 25:14-30)

In my experience, two specific phrases can take responsibility for the failure of churches everywhere, “Well, we’ve always done it that way” and “But, we need to keep it nice looking.” The first speaks to a lack of awareness of how the Spirit of God moves and shifts over time. The latter looks a lot like burying your one talent in the sand. I live in a 1950s ranch style home, so the builders built it for an era where each family needed two sitting areas – a living room and a den. Maybe, in the 1950s, both rooms got used a fair amount, but I grew up, not in the 1950s, but still in an era where people  felt the need to have a formal sitting area and an informal sitting. I observed that for most people this meant that they had a sitting area that got used (the informal one) and one that exclusively gathered dust (the formal one).

Churches are far worse offenders in this than the average homeowner. Wesley Community Development, a ministry of the Western North Carolina Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church, helps churches figure out how to best use their spaces and properties to maximize their impact for God’s Kingdom. As part of their process, they analyze the total square footage a church has and, then, look at how often each space gets used. The shocking fact is that most church space that they look at sits unused as much as 90% of the time. We have huge gathering spaces that we call sanctuaries. We use them one to four hours per week. The same goes for our community spaces and classrooms. Churches tend to have activities in limited time bands, but outside of those bands, the space goes unused. Some of this stems from us needing to think about new potential activities and ministries or community partners that could use the space – needing to expand our imaginations. However, in my experience, we might have a deeper spiritual issue.

In the following stories, details have been altered to protect the innocent.

A small but active medium sized church has just built a new activities building. They spent a lot on it and built it to a high degree of polish. The whole project grew out of the fact that they’d fundamentally outgrown their tiny kitchen. They feed dozens of children per week, host massive community meals, and hold several major food based fundraisers every year. Upon completion of the new building, with its huge, well equipped, and shiny new kitchen, the head of the kitchen team for the weekday children’s ministry comes to the pastor and says, “I think that we will just keep using the old kitchen. We don’t want to mess up the new one.” They had leveraged the financial future of their church for a kitchen that they weren’t going to use?  Why have this incredible kitchen if not to use it?

A church large in facility but small in membership has fundamentally overbuilt. They built thinking that they would grow, but for a lot of reasons, growth did not occur. Recent changes in the life of congregation have brought new life, and a new ESL ministry is about to launch. The ESL folks will use the Sunday School classrooms on a weekday evening. An important leader in the congregation pulls the pastor aside. The conversation escalates, until the leader’s true concern comes out. “They’re messing up everything in classroom,” he bellows. The ESL folks had not done anything of the sort. They had rearranged some things and moved some of their stuff into the space. Why do minor changes feel like a space being destroyed?

We called it, “not wanting things to get messed up,” but it’s burying our talents in the ground rather than using them for the Kingdom. During the communist period in Russia, they converted prominent churches into “museums of atheism,” but if we take our unwillingness to let our spaces be used to its logical extreme, we end up operating “museums of theism.” Museums seek preservation above all else. Churches use their talents to bring an increase. In 2014, I went to the Cathedral in Leon, Spain, as part of a journey along the Camino de Santiago. Like many old, European churches, it operates more as a literal museum than an active house of worship. However, Leon Cathedral took this to an unusual degree. You had to pay to even enter the small side chapel set aside for prayer. I don’t know a lot of churches who have gone this far – a literal pay to pray scheme. Still, it’s all the same logic and only different in terms of extent. We have nice things. We must preserve them. We want to show God how seriously we value God’s gifts. Let’s bury them so that they don’t get lost or damaged.

The following story has not been modified to protect anyone.

Smith Chapel had an annual cowboy themed Christmas play. It felt strange to me as a Texas boy in the mountains of northwest Georgia, but they got a kick out it. The church doesn’t have a ton of space, but what they do have has been maintained. Things get painted. The carpet gets re-stretched. New roofs get put on as needed. Everything looks nice but not too nice. For the cowboy Christmas play, every inch of the sanctuary is liable for rearrangement. I made them take the altar out because it looked like it was about to get used as the bar for the saloon, and even for me, that felt like a bridge too far. Stuff got scuffed in the process. This would happen on a Saturday night, and we’d have to push to restore things back for Sunday. We had to fix and patch and put it `back together. Yet, each year that I got to be a part of it, it was standing room only in that little sanctuary.

“For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.” (Matthew 25:29 NRSV)