Working with Churches that Have Building Issues (Hint: Don’t start by talking about the building…) – 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. I’m your host Reverend Jim Latimer. We have the great pleasure of having with us today, Reverend Dr. Shelley Stackhouse. Shelly has served in parish ministry a long time and has the wisdom, and no doubt a few scars to show for it – although I haven’t asked about that – but probably there are if you’ve been in it for a while and learned a lot of really good stuff. And she’s also been in transitional ministry – a lot in various flavors of that – including intentional interim. And now I think she’s in a designated position. And she’s got a lot of experience serving congregations in urban areas that have big buildings. And that is a hot issue. And I asked her if she would please speak in this first podcast segment here to what she’s learned about working with churches that have building issues.
Shelly Stackhouse
Hi, Jim. Yes. Well, people who know me well have heard me say that I think God has a perverse sense of humor. And one of the ways that that has been true over almost 40 years of ministry is that I never actually wanted to deal with buildings. You know, I wanted to deal with mission and worship and all that good stuff. And yet, from the very beginning, I found myself – as most of us do – in churches that had aging buildings, or buildings with challenges of one kind or another. I had to do a lot of learning on the job, because one of the courses they don’t give you in seminary is general contracting, or how to fix the furnace when the furnace is 75 years old. Nobody tells you how to do this. And unless you come from a household where you had a parent who was a fixer upper, and you learned all that stuff, and some people have, but I did not.
So, it was all learning on the job. And a couple of things have come out of that. One is an appreciation for buildings, actually. I used to think – I went through a phase in my ministry – if we just get rid of all the freaking buildings, we can really be faithful people. And a couple of things have happened with that. One is a long-time friendship with Donna Schaper. She is a person who has thought very creatively about buildings, and how they might be used. Most recently when she was the pastor at Judson Church, and as she has founded an organization called Bricks and Mortals, which is working with congregations who have the possibility of transforming their buildings into low income housing, or some kind of housing to help people. That is a great organization.
But the other way is in those urban congregations that you talked about in New Haven, and in Hartford, in particular, discovering that the buildings had become places of safety for people in a whole variety of ways; safety in ways that you might expect, like on a Sunday morning, but also places where people who were on the street, people who were in social services, and were looking for allies, safe places for beauty. That was one of my biggest learnings. And that one came particularly in Hartford, though also in New Haven, and I can tell lots of stories. But here’s one out of Hartford about the beauty piece, which took me by surprise. We had a man who was unhoused, who lived on the streets in Hartford. And he began to come regularly to worship with us. I got to know him and got to talking with him. One day, he said, You know, one of the reasons that I come here is that this place is so beautiful. And the vast majority of my time I spend in places that are ugly. And I walk in here and the windows and the light and everything is so beautiful. And he said, And then I get every Sunday to hear a concert. I get to hear this organ play and a choir sing, and the people around me sing, and it’s so beautiful! I can’t afford to go to the Bushnell or someplace else where I can go to a concert where I hear beautiful music. This is the best part of my week. It’s the time in the week when I can breathe.
That had never occurred to me. And yet, here it was. And I don’t think that is a unique experience. I think many of us underestimate the power of the beauty of our space, because it seems to us to be expensive and wasteful. I learned in Hartford – when we were spending what I thought was an outrageous amount of money to repair our steeple which was literally falling down – people on the street, after it was repaired and the scaffolding came down and the clock was fixed and the bells were ringing – folk who were going in and out of the Travelers Tower across the street, if they happened to see me out there and knew who I was, or somehow could tell I was affiliated with the church, would stop me and say, Thank you. Thank you. We’ve really missed this.
These aren’t church folk that I know of, and certainly weren’t part of our church. But it contributed to the beauty of downtown Hartford. And I’m going to get in trouble here, but there’s a lot of not beautiful in downtown Hartford. But that place is beautiful. So, you can understand – and especially in historic buildings, which Redeemer UCC in New Haven was not, but the one in Hartford is a historic building – it’s easy for us, my knee jerk reaction, talking with people who want to preserve a building like that in the past would have been that this is the idolatry of the building. And there is certainly an amount of that around among church members. Idolatry of the building, where the building itself becomes more important than the mission; where the building itself is understood to be the church. And footnote: I think one of the biggest pieces of linguistic damage that has been done over long periods of time in English, is that “church” has become equivalent to “building.” So, people talk about “going to church” or “looking at the church,” by which they mean the building. So, the whole concept of church has been separated from its original intent, which was the body of Christ, the people of God, in mission. Anyway, that’s a footnote. There is idolatry of buildings.
Jim Latimer
Sure. So, can I just pause you there, Shelly? That’s eloquent. I appreciate the perspective that you gained over time. My first career was in engineering. So, I look at a building and appreciate the beauty, but I also think, This is expensive! How are we going to do this?! I don’t get how this is going to work. We don’t have big pots of money in the backyard. If we do, it’s a different story. And some churches do. Most don’t. Even those in big buildings, they don’t have that. And so, I love your story of the guy who spends a lot of time living outside. And, and the beauty of that he finds in the building. And so, there’s that part of it. There is idolatry of the building. It’s the family chapel with a minister that just happens to be the clan priest. We have that model.
Well, we need physical space where we can gather, physically gather and do that. And it needs to be practical. And it needs to be affordable. Right? So, I can see we’ll have to have another podcast segment after this one, but just help us Shelley – because you’ve been in this several times – what have you done? What magic maybe? What do you have to do to get people to talk about, What do we do with this? The poetry’s beautiful, etc. – those are beautiful things. But how do you get them talking about things that matter for their ministry? And it might be, We’re gonna spend all of our assets on this (building), and that’s our mission! God bless them. But decide to do that! Don’t let it just happen to you.
Shelly Stackhouse
That’s it! So many congregations just let it happen to them as though there isn’t another choice. So, because folks don’t see all the alternatives available to them, they often come down to either status quo, or completely getting rid of the building and going. They see nothing in between. There are so many challenges to talking about this in a group. And I have failed as often as I’ve succeeded. Any of us that have been in this business for very long can tell you as many failures as successes, sometimes more. But I hope that every time I fail, I learn. That’s what I kept trying to teach my kids is when something would go wrong, I’d say, Okay, what have we learned from this? So, a couple of things, have been really, really helpful. One, is to take a congregation through looking back at the church in its beginnings.
I think the book of Acts is one of the most neglected resources for Christians in trying to discern how to be church. Nobody in the book of Acts is in a building, except tangentially in someone’s home. But not in a dedicated building that’s just for church. To go back to that, of the Pentecost space, where the Spirit busted out of the building, and busted the disciples out of the building in a powerful way, I think is a really important piece. But how wonderful, first of all as a clergy person to do it for yourself, but then to do it with your congregation. And I think, by the way, this is a task that is particularly suited to interims and transitional ministers – this going through with a congregation, What does it actually mean to be church? To go back and walk through the book of Acts, and look at what the signs of being church are. And someday when I have just tons of time, I’m going to write a Bible study that helps us do that. That’s not going to happen in the next few months.
So, y’all can do it on your own. And you can! It’s not hard. Do a read through of the book of Acts. And you can find all sorts of places where you can help a congregation to ask questions about what does it mean to be church. So, you’re not talking about building! Don’t start with a conversation about building. Start with a conversation about what it means to be church. And see what comes out of that. And I’ve heard some amazing things come out of it. I heard a man who I thought, you know, this guy was a lifetime trustee and was older than I was by some amount of years. And the building was everything to him. And that’s what he devoted his time to in the church. And coming out of one of those Bible studies one day saying, You know, actually, we don’t really need the church building quite so much to do what we want to do. And I just sort of sat there and just, went, Okay, I do believe in the Holy Spirit!
So, I think that’s the first thing: take us back to what it means to be church. And then the second thing is to open up this conversation to say, there is more than one way to solve whatever issue we have. So, whether it is big building, old building, or not well-made building that has systems breaking down and therefore is wicked expensive building. What are the ways?
Jim Latimer
Yeah. Continuing Shelly – go ahead.
Shelly Stackhouse
Thanks. So, the second issue is that there is more than one way to address this problem. It’s not just keeping the building as is and spend billions of dollars, or get rid of it and be homeless or close. There are a plethora of other options. And most of them are only going to surface when the congregation spends a great deal of time considering how it relates to the community around it.
Jim Latimer
Oh, that was gold right there! So, that takes good facilitation. That takes creation of the sacred space for people to be appropriately vulnerable and open their eyes to see the relationship with the community – the relationship with the physical community that’s around them.
Shelly Stackhouse
Right! So, who are your partners in the community? They may be people already using your space. They may be people that have other spaces that are inadequate to what they need, and if you get to know them well enough you’ll learn that. They may be partners that it hadn’t occurred to you might be willing to use your space. And the little trick with this – that sometimes is the harder part of the conversation – is that in order for your space to be usable by other people, and for you not to vacate it, you may have to change the space. You may have to make changes in the space. So, it’s the Pew conversation.
Jim Latimer
Okay, so we might have to change the space, whatever. But I really appreciate your thought – your wisdom that you’ve gained – that this is not a dichotomy of spend all our money on this, or just sell it. There are quite a number of options in between that we only will see and can engage when we really delve into discernment with the community around us. So that’s a perfect place to end right now, Shelley. And because I know you’ve also got another hat that you wear in working in another job where you talk with folks about sacred places – sacred spaces. So, let’s wrap this up here, and then I want to go to the resources needed to support this conversation in the next podcast. Thanks.
Shelly Stackhouse Great. Thank you.
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