What Does Your Building Say About Who You Are? – Transcript

Jim Latimer: Welcome to Coaching for Interims. We are about empowerment for interim ministers: best practices and quick help from interims for interims – wisdom from the field. Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Reverend Dr. Jill Small. Jill, what best practice, would you like to share with us now?

Jill: Well, thanks for asking Jim. Today, I would like to start by talking about buildings, facilities that we use as the starting point for our mission and Ministry.
I first became interested in this a long time ago, when I saw a building, an old church building, being razed and members of that congregation weeping as the as the wrecking ball hit the building and running up and picking up bricks and taking them home as mementos.
That awareness developed over quite a long period of time, about how important the relationship is between our congregations and our buildings, and it really came to a head when I started to recognize that in interim ministry, I was encountering a lot of aging congregations in aging buildings.

Jim Latimer: Oh wow.

Jill: And what relationship might there be to that. So here are the things I think are important to put on the radar.
There’s a wonderful book by Alain de Botton called “The Architecture of Happiness.” I recommend it to any pastor. And one of the things he says in there is we are different people in different places, and he does have a whole section about churches. We’re different people in different places, and this is really based in a science called Place Identity, that there is connective tissue between people who invest energy into a space and the energy that that space gives them. So there is a there’s a symbiotic relationship there in a good way.
So there’s that – that we’re different people in different places. The second thing is, quite a few years ago now, probably almost 40 years ago, there was an Avery and Marsh song called, “We Are the Church,” and one of the first verses, “The church is not a building, the church is not a steeple, the church is not a resting place the church is the people.” That’s true. And yet that’s become more clear to us, I think, in this Covid time, a time when we’re aware that we’re not in physical buildings, but we’re still the church. That said, the church is identifiable as the place from which we take our strength and energy, our comfort. It is imbued with the meaning that we bring to it, and that we take from it.
And this was sort of the last a-ha that came to me in my study. I looked at buildings, just as buildings, and it was pretty late in the game when I started to realize that a building will have an indelible meaning for you, if it’s the last place you saw your spouse during that person’s funeral, where it’s the place where your children were married.
So that awareness of the emotional impact of building, I think, also is important. The third, a third thing is that, like any building, including your own house, you probably don’t have enough space for all your stuff. And so I think an interim time is a really good opportunity to take a look at the stuff that that building houses and to do so by honoring it, and perhaps if you watched Marie Kondo, I mean she’s made a whole career out of saying, “honor and thank the things that have been meaningful to you and then pass them on.”

Jim Latimer: The KonMarie Method, yes.

Jill: Yes, so this is a really good time and interim I think is a really good time to do an inventory. I think it has to be done gently. I would urge the pastor not to do it in isolation, because for sure, you’ll throw away somebody’s you know, mother-in-law’s funeral service, and that will be, you know, a crisis.
But find out who, I don’t know the right word here, like somebody who would be a docent of the congregation who would be able to say, these are things that we have that mean something to us, and find a way to honor them, even if it means you need to move them on.

And another thing about stuff. I think it’s always important in an interim time to have some conversation about the stuff that a congregation, what might be in your closets, and how important that stuff is to you. Not in terms of its necessarily intrinsic value, but whether it facilitates your mission and ministry. And one of the questions that came to the fore in a congregation I served was there was a neighboring UCC church having a wedding. The wedding couple wanted to have Communion served at their ceremony, but that small church did not have enough Communion trays.
So they called the church I was serving and said, “Can we borrow some Communion ware from you?” And there was a real conversation among the deacons, “You know this stuff is worth a lot of money, and we don’t usually loan our stuff.” And sometimes, you know the Spirit just puts the right words in your mouth at the right time and I said, you know, “If your stuff is too precious to you to loan to another church it is probably too precious to you.”

And there was an a-ha moment for them. I really think that that’s a Spirit-speak. I don’t know. I didn’t think that in advance. But they loaned the Communion ware to the neighboring congregation.

Jim: So one of the pieces there Jill, as I’m hearing you saying, is, to what degree does your stuff support your mission and your ministry? And that also means that you have some clarity about what your mission and your ministry objectives are, right?

Jill: That is true, and I think sometimes we don’t look at the physical stuff when we talk about that. We talk about it on the theoretical level or the mission statement level, but we don’t necessarily look at the space or the stuff in that space that makes that mission ministry real, tangible for people.
So…

Jim Latimer: Nice Nice.

Jill: And the last thing I would say is it’s an interesting thing to walk the space, whether you do it with your deacons or with your building and grounds committee, but to really walk the space and to take a look at it from a visitor’s point of view. You know, do you see where the front door is? Do you see, you know, if you didn’t know where the bathrooms were and you needed to find one in a hurry, would you be able to do so?
Is it inviting? Does it smell funky? I mean there are all kinds of things. But walking the buildings and taking taking note of the walls and windows, because the walls are very cocooning and safe. They help you to feel very safe in your space, but the windows, are what let you see out into the community and invite the community in.

So those are the things I would say, as an initial look at our identity in our church buildings. I’d look at those things.

Jim Latimer: And what are building say about who we are. That’s beautiful. Jill Thank you so very much. I appreciate your thoughts on this topic. Very important. Thank you.

Jill: Thank you, Jim.

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