Building Campaigns...

I don’t really know how to approach this topic… I am struggling with this so much and I really do not know where my angst has come from. My heart has been so heavy since leaving church a couple of weeks ago and it has affected my attitude in a multitude of ways. As my wife can attest I haven’t been the most fun lately and not that this is the reason or any kind of excuse but the internal struggle going on within me certainly has affected other parts of my life.

Our church recently went through a building campaign to build a new church building for our neighboring campus a few miles down the road (we have been renting an elementary school to meet in on Sundays for quite some time) and to modify our existing building with new children and youth areas, a gym, and some other small changes. Last week was the big reveal of how much money people have pledged to give above and beyond regular giving over the next three years. But before I get there I should go to the service that has been weighing down my heart.

A couple of weeks ago we had Commitment Sunday where everyone was supposed to turn in their pledge cards and following the service there was a catered brunch for all in attendance as a means of celebration for turning in your pledge. I thought it might just be me but, as I was talking to my wife, she had talked to one of our friends about the service and she felt some of the same things as I had. So I thought I needed to go back and listen to the message again and maybe dig into it a little bit. I would like to say that everything was resolved by just listening to the message again and I didn’t have my coffee yet the morning while first hearing to the message. As would be suggested by the enormous amount of text below, I wasn’t able to resolve my issues by listening to it again.

In reflection, I think this has been building within me for some time and weighing me down more and more deeply. I don’t know how to find release and the burden is getting tougher to bear but maybe through writing down some of my thoughts I will feel a little better… I apologize for the length and random tangents but this post is more for me than anything else.

As our church approached this building campaign I wasn’t sure how I felt about it in general because on a deeper level I just feel that there is so much more we could do to minister to the people around us and it is not like we are bursting at the seems to outgrow the building we are in. When we get to the point were we are having church all day and the services are all standing room only then I might think its time to think about building a bigger building but at that point you would think that the volume of people in attendance would fund the building without much effort. Making the need for a campaign a non-event. I also think that if it is really God’s will for a new building then he will provide the means by which to achieve it without much of a forthright effort. I understand there are a lot of problems with thinking about it this way but never the less from a high level perspective this is sort of how I think about things and going into the campaign I didn’t have a big soft spot in my heart for it. I expressed my concerns to Crystal and we both set off to pray about it while at the same time being asked to be a part of the leadership team on the campaign. While I could have easily fulfilled the task that was requested of us for the campaign I just didn’t feel like my heart was in the right place and I didn’t want to be hypocritical in convincing people to support something that I wasn’t sure I supported. I am sorry to say I declined the request to be a part of the leadership team and continued praying.

One thing that I had been struggling with for quite some time prior to the campaign was how to define the proper level of sacrifice for living as a Christian in our culture. Both financially and physically what am I called to do? I have tithed 10% of my wages to my church from the time that I started working at sixteen and really never thought twice about it because I believe that this is what God has called us to. I know that all I have is really Gods anyways and giving 10% isn’t really a burden. To be honest, my family has never seen that ten percent and thus don’t really know what it would be like to live with it. Living without it isn’t really much of a sacrifice because we just assume it isn’t there and have built our whole life around it not being there. On top of that we sponsor a child in Guatemala on monthly basis and give to several other charities, organizations, and special mission events throughout the year. I guess if you were to add everything up it is much more than 10% but as I continue to develop my own beliefs I don’t think that there is a set percentage God wants us to give to him.

However, I will say that there have been several times we have overspent our allowance and made dumb decisions with the money we had but God has been faithful beyond all measure. I remember specific times we had bills due and didn’t know where the money would come from to pay them and a check would show up in the mailbox saying that they had incorrectly charged us on our mortgage and sent us a thousand dollars. On more than one occasion things like this have happened and it is no doubt Gods way of showing us if we are faithful, he will take care of us. My wife and I have come a very long way in stewarding our finances and I am very happy with our life. The American way is always bigger and better and more and more and in my heart I really don’t desire any thing else. Sure I see a nice car on the freeway and I say to myself that is nice or we drive past a nice house and I say wow that is nice but in my heart, between me and God, if I really felt him calling me and Jesus stood before me today as in Matthew 19:21 I truly believe I would do just as he said and drop it all. If it were truly of God, I know Crystal would trust me, she would follow me and without looking back we would take the kids and go wherever he wanted us to.

I find money to be a funny thing. It is the source of so many problems for so many people and yet it remains the definition of happiness for people. In much of our pre-marriage counseling we were told that one of the main things we would fight about would be money. Crystal and I found this to be very true and I would say that many of our conflicts have arisen from the use of our money and blaming each other for our spending habits. I am sure that many of you have been there where you don’t know how you are going to pay for something you rightly do or don’t need to pay for and thinking about it constantly you are on edge. It affects your relationship with your spouse and other areas of your life. It is like these chains get wrapped around you and you are this slippery slope, the more you struggle the further you begin to slide down the slope and despite your best tries you can’t get out of the chains to free yourself. Before you know it things are sliding way beyond your control. Then there are those times when we get a running start and dive headfirst down the slope but I suppose that is a different problem all in itself.

So if this is the cause of so much of tension within marriages and life in general do you think that God has called us to live on the fine edge where we are constantly worrying how things are going to work out? I wonder then do I just not have enough faith in God to take care of me? I have been given answers both ways to this questions by people I really trust and look up to…

I was recently reading in Acts 5 how it is talking about all the believers sharing all of their possessions. Living together and sharing what they had such that there weren’t any needy people among them. This part I think is pretty cool but starting in Chapter 5 we meet a man named Ananias and his wife. They set out to sell a piece of land and donate the money but before donating the money they decide to keep some of it for themselves. At first it doesn’t really seem like that big of a deal but as I kept reading I saw that Peter shows and says that they lied to the Holy Spirit and they both die. Ok, so maybe what they did was bad. They made a bigger sacrifice than most people I know today would by selling the land and donating any part of it. As I studied it a little more what I found was that their sin was in saying they were going to give it all to God and then in secret they withheld some of what they sold it for. The lie was the sin and it was meant to point out that God knows all and it is all Gods in the first place anyways so it doesn’t matter for you to keep it. My human nature tells me that what they did doesn’t seem to warrant the consequences. I need to spend some more time with this one thinking about it…

Sorry for the background but this is what I came into the service with bouncing around in my mind. So, coming back to the sermon on Commitment Sunday a few weeks ago, some of the things I came away with through words and actions were: 1. How much money our church raises in this campaign will determine how effective we will be at ministering to people and with enough money we will be able to build the right tools to minister to people. 2. Commitment is voluntary but if I wasn’t committing something I wasn’t committed to our church or to the vision of ministering to the lost people of our community. 3. No message of giving would be complete without a reminder of Romans 12:1, to offer my body as a living sacrifice. (what is it that Paul was trying to say there anyways? I will have to study this a little more) 4. Coming forward and placing my offering in the bucket at the foot of a cross and in front of everyone else to see how committed I am is a worship experience and even if I already pledged some level of commitment I need to come in front of everyone else and put my card in the bucket. 5. I can not give partially and should not doubt that this is Gods plan or as in Numbers those with doubting, pride, calloused hearts did not receive the promise. After reading this further I basically concluded that God killed the people for their grumbling in the desert. 6. Because God loves us and died for us this is our way of worshiping and honoring him. Love always leads to giving, thus writing down my commitment amount on the card is worshiping God.

Reflecting on that, wow there sure is a lot to unpack in the message of that Sunday and I am sure I missed things as well as misinterpreted things but I have replayed it in my head and listened a couple of times. There are certainly some things that have strong biblical ties and I think I would agree on the outside with a lot of the things there. As Crystal can attest, I am usually pretty easily convinced most of the time so why can’t I convince my heart that this is what God wants from me?

Moving forward a couple more weeks, our church revealed that it had raised more than $4 million dollars through the campaign, which I have to admit is very impressive. We will be able to build the new building with our sister campus and stop renting the elementary school on Sunday and get started on some renovations to our other current building. I think the cause is noble and I pray many people are reached for years to come. One question that will not get out of my head is from the Reveal Study that Willow Creek is in right now. If someone came to you and said here is a million dollars (or in this case, $4 million), take it and use it the best way you can to reach as many people that you can for Christ. What would you do? (If you have thoughts on this, leave it in a comment below) To be honest I wouldn’t even know where to begin…

There are so many different directions to go within my own community and if I pause to think about what I can do in the world as a community it is astounding! I started reading a new book and I am just barely into it but it is ripping my heart apart. “The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities of Our Time” I don’t know what I will think when I am finished but some of the things he is sharing in the beginning about the African tragedy occurring right now can not help but bring tears to my eyes when I really stop and think about it. It is one thing to see pictures or read about of what is going on in so many parts of Africa and other places today. But when you stop and really think about it, 15,000 Africans die every day. Assume in the dense parts of the city there are 7,500 people per square mile and two square miles of people die each day. That is entire city blocks that are full of life today and tomorrow they are vacant. It would take less than a month and a half and the entire population of Seattle would be gone.

The tragedy of the world around us is that in our culture if we don’t have to look at it we don’t have to think about it. I heard this analogy of a small baby, if you place the rattle directly in front of the baby their complete attention becomes focused on it but as soon as you remove it from the babies sight they no longer even think about it. Can you imagine what it would be like to watch TV and every commercial was about the nightmare going on all around us that we could actually do something about.

Yesterday 8,000 children died of Malaria. Many of these children could have been saved for as little as 20 cents per child. A heart breaking price to place on the life of a little kid as precious to someone as my own two are to me. If the $4 million dollars were used for this one cause at 20 cents per child you could save 20 million children’s lives. Even further not another one of these children would have to die for the next 2,500 days or 7 years. I think that when things get put into perspective like that it just moves ministering to people to a whole different level. You are not just ministering to people you are saving their lives.

I am not saying that this is where our church should have put the money or anything like that at all. It just seems that there are some pressing things in this world that need our attention. If we are one church and we were able to raise $4 million dollars in a couple of weeks. Imagine what we could do with the church down the street and the one down the street from that one and on and on. I was talking to a guy at my work recently and found out that his church, that is in this same area, is also in the midst of planning a building campaign for their church. Talking with our parents recently Crystal and I discovered that their church (within walking distance of our church) is in the midst of planning a building campaign. Then in talking with Crystal’s sister, their church too is in the middle of a building campaign. Four churches within a twenty minute radius of each other and all building?

It just seems that the whole thing goes right along with the stereotype of the American culture of materialism. If we only had this then we could do that. The truth is God doesn't need any of it to reach his people... I personally didn't become a Christian because of the music Christians sing or the sports that they play or the way they look or any of that... I don’t live my life as a Christian because of any of that either. The realization that I was made to worship Christ and he alone is the only thing that will fill the depths of my soul. That is the message the people need to hear. They need to feel the real love that we can have for each other as people. It is really just all about Jesus and nothing more, nothing less.

So after saying all that I am not sure where this leaves me but with a heavy heart and anxiously continuing to pray and seek Gods will. I keep praying for him to soften my heart but I haven’t made very much progress on that prayer in the past few months. Everything I hear about the region that I live in is that the number of Christians is not actually growing but shrinking. Despite all of the building campaigns, it doesn’t seem like it is the lack of church buildings as a reason why we aren’t getting through to our culture. I can go into almost any community and find a number of different church buildings of all shapes, sizes, and denominations. On top of that I haven’t heard any testimonies of people actively seeking Christ leaving their church because the building isn’t the right size, shape, or color. Something is missing. Something is not quite right. Something has to change…

Thanks for letting me share something on my heart,
T~

On a slightly different subject, I am hoping my son will poop in the toilet soon. Crystal and I have decided Monday is the day we will begin potty training with an all or nothing approach. I am hoping for an all in the toilet approach personally…