Holy Space

Less than a few weeks into my new life as the pastor of a mid-size church, I feel compelled to think through some of the terrific lessons I learned from the last place.  I had a unique opportunity to try new things and push the boundaries of ministry in interesting ways.  Some of the things I learned might be helpful for others.

One of the great adventures of my time at Montgomery First UMC was the development of the Cloverdale School project.  Cloverdale School is a closed down junior high school that had been only slightly used since Huntingdon College bought it from the school district in 2002.  During my time at Montgomery First, the church leased a major portion of the building and put me in charge of filling it with ministry and programming consistent with its Long Range Plan.

Though I was given a big building in poor repair and a lot of rope, I was not given staff support or the money necessary to hire out renovations.  Everything was done by volunteers, and all the furnishings were hand-me-downs from the main campus.  I administrated the facility while I maintained all my duties at the main campus, so whatever I did had to be on the side.

Cloverdale School has been a part of the life of the community since 1922, so we quickly decided that we needed to approach the use of the facility in a way that made the building available to the neighborhood.  We needed to celebrate the history of the building's role in community life and give it back to the neighborhood as a resource for the fulfillment of the community's dreams for itself.

When word got out, we quickly found that there were people in the city who had good things they wanted to do and were only limited by the lack of a place to do them.  Two different ballroom dancing groups began to hold dances there.  The city's fencing club began to use the facility weekly.  Three non-profit organizations moved their offices there.  A support group for folks with Parkinson's disease began to meet there, as did Alcoholics Anonymous.  Impact Alabama, an organization that develops creative initiatives to combat poverty, partnered with Huntingdon College to teach students how to prepare tax returns for the working poor.  The school began to use the facility, too, for worship, concerts, dances, even cheerleading practice.  Some students brought their theology books and computers up there to write papers all night during crunch time.  Those are just a few of the things that happened that had nothing to do with church programming in the building.

Here's what it taught me:  If the United Methodist Church has anything, it has a lot of dead empty buildings.  And there's no reason for those buildings to be empty.  Ever.  If a dead empty junior high school can fill up with people of all types doing all kinds of activities at all times of the day with no staff support and no facilities investment (not even a janitor to empty the trash), then there's no reason that every building in the United Methodist family can't be full, too.  So why aren't they?

I think our buildings are empty because we think that they should be used for church activities.  We had church activities and trustee oversight and all that at Cloverdale School, but we put a premium on letting the community know that the reason we leased the facility was to give it back to them.  So they came.  And relationships were established.  And it took a whale of a lot less time and effort than it would have taken to plan and staff those activities if we'd organized them ourselves.

All of our buildings were consecrated when they were opened.  That means they were set aside to be used for God's purpose, not ours.  They don't belong to us, and they don't belong to the United Methodist Church.  That's why we call them "trustees"--they hold God's buildings in a sacred trust to make sure they are used for God's purpose.  And God has shown us how he works by becoming a human being and giving his life away as an expression of his great love for the world.

Cloverdale School was maybe the best example I've seen of that kind of theology being lived out in the way facilities are used.  I think if we all learned something from what happened there, we could see the Kingdom of God actualized in some very cool ways.  The building is not ours.  It belongs to Christ and he wants to bless the world and give it away for the good of the community.