Not Quite a Stewardship Sermon (11.10.19)
Not Quite a Stewardship Sermon
(slated to be Ties of Love, Hosea 11.1-9)
November 10, 2019
Rev. Elizabeth Mangham Lott
St. Charles Ave. Baptist Church
I can’t predict when it will happen, but there are Sundays maybe once a year, perhaps twice, when I wake up and look at the scripture provided by the lectionary, and the notes on themes I’d planned out just don’t quite guide me to the words I feel I need to speak. Nevertheless, do hold onto the images we have from our two readings: one of welcoming everyone, particularly when it feels inconvenient or interrupts your expectation of what the life of faith is supposed to look like. The other: a profession of love from God for the people of God even when they stop listening.
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Here’s the thing: We have reached a season of work in the life of St. Charles that, if we are not intentional, can feel removed from the deep, high, wide love of Christ and altogether daunting if not overwhelming. If you walk down any of the interior stairs from the sanctuary to the first floor, you’ll pass swaths of peeling plaster—what we now understand to be efflorescence—and you’ll make your way to the bare concrete floor of Building A. That’s what we sometimes call this oldest of our three buildings here. Constructed in 1925, first open to the congregation in 1926, the upper levels have barely changed from their initial design. The lower level, however, has morphed at least twice and is now morphing again as we spent the past two weeks in what felt like a hazmat zone as room after room of asbestos tile and glue were stripped from the concrete subfloor.
It’s one of those projects that we knew needed to happen eventually, and then we finally had no choice but to address it after two floods earlier this year made much of the tile buckle and the rooms unsafe for daily use. Now we have bare concrete that will most likely be stained and sealed…but that’s only phase 1 of what will be a few phases over the next 2-5 years.
We’ve been in a dreaming and discerning state for most of my six years here, and I know the folks who were here in the two years prior to my arrival had already done a good bit of that. That’s almost a decade of asking: Who will we be in our next chapter and how will we write that story? How do we sense God’s Spirit leading us as we look 5, 10, and 20 years into the future? There has definitely been some angst in that dreaming and discerning process because we don’t all conceptualize the future in exactly the same ways. But we have persevered and now ended that big, wide process. Now we move into a focused, purposeful season of work and doing.
We have chosen as a congregation to launch an interfaith nonprofit focused on the intersection of sacred story and social justice. The St. Charles Center for Faith + Action will be our missional legacy well into the future and has the capacity to reach a much broader audience than we as a congregation do because of its invitation to all people of faith and people of conscience.
But the dreaming and discerning of that organization, which can be exhilarating and even romantic, necessarily leads to a season of work. The working group for the Center has met almost weekly to create and refine articles of incorporation, bylaws, fundraising materials, and the other necessary legal documents to formally file as a 501(c)(3) organization. In donations pledged and received, the Center is approaching $95,000 in funds; about half of what it needs to be able to hire the first staff and begin programming.
The working group has met with dozens of faith and civic leaders to build a strong, diverse board of directors who have their first meeting this Wednesday. The board we hope to build will be Protestant, Catholic, Unitarian Universalist, Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, younger, older, straight, gay. This board is a reflection of the communities the Center will gather in its work. This organization is almost ready to take off and have a life of its own. A life you in this room dreamed into being with the wild and dancing Spirit of God.
We have gone from macro to micro in our work together, and it’s hard to toggle back and forth. Macro can feel very freeing because we’re looking at possibilities and big picture and not limiting ourselves to any one outcome. There’s a safety to playing in that space of ideas and broad aperture, as our friends at Thrive Impact like to say. But now we have narrowed the lens, the focus, and are in the micro of doing the things we collectively dreamed.
We first learned of the Fund for Sacred Places in 2017, a week before the Letter of Intent was due for submission. I looked at the website that year and knew we could not pull together the necessary documentation in a week’s time and that a larger process would need to take place first, if we were to apply. We weren’t ready in 2017. We began listening sessions later that year and continued into early 2018. That’s when we returned to Sacred Places a second time. Nancy Sanders researched the grant, the program, and even spoke with folks on staff at Partners for Sacred Places to learn about the scope of their work.
It wasn’t until 2019, a full two years later, after months of discernment work on our own and with Thrive Impact, that we were ready to submit that letter of intent. And then the full proposal. And now, we are the first congregation in the city of New Orleans and the state of Louisiana to be accepted into the Fund; one of 10 congregations in the nation who will participate in this 2019-2020 cohort.
That’s exciting, and it feels good to announce and celebrate and tell our friends and guests. But after the announcement comes the work. To honor our part of the agreement, we must raise $500,000 in capital funds in the next 24 months before we will be awarded the full grant of $250,000.
If you’re keeping track, that’s another $90,000 minimum we need to honor our initial commitment to the Center and $500,000 for Sacred Places. Round up, and we’re at $600,000.
But toggle back to the macro with me for a minute. How far does $750,000 go toward addressing capital needs here? That’s bricks, mortar, plaster, water intrusion, old HVAC; all of those things in the physical plant that we easily ignore unless something breaks or water ends up where it’s not supposed to be.
We do not have an endowment here. We have some limited, invested funds that we are rapidly depleting for large expenses. We have designated funds set aside for very specific purposes. But if something big broke today, we do not have the money for the repair. That is why the $500,000 Sacred Places goal needs to be paired with a $1 million endowment goal.
If you’re looking around the room thinking which one of the folks NOT at the Saints game right now has pockets that deep. The answer: no one that I know of. Yet. Not all of that money can come from within this congregation or even our closest friends.
Keep breathing.
In the next two months, we will move toward a comprehensive fundraising plan that addresses the Center, the Sacred Places grant, an Endowment, and our Operating Budget. With all of that forward looking planning, we need to remember that the life and work of the church continues each and every day.
Essentially, we are going to raise over $1.5 million between now and our 125th anniversary as a church. And we will also continue to honor the day-to-day needs of our operating budget. To do all of this well, we need diverse revenue streams—a combination of grants, smart requests to family foundations and neighbors who care about historic preservation, strategic asks to some of the thousands of people who passed through this place across the 20th century, and possibly avenues we haven’t even considered yet.
And some of it will come from you. This is one of the harder things for preachers like me to do. I’m not a jet-flying, luxury-vehicle driving, red-soled-Loubiton wearing preacher. I am more concerned with your heart, your mind, and your soul than I am with what you put in the offering plate. I want to know that we are living out our call here to be a school of love, practitioners of grace, growing together in empathy and lovingkindness. I am never ever ever ever going to ask you to make me rich and powerful so that you somehow think you have better access to the Divine. We have the same access to the Divine now already.
So why do I believe we need to enter this season of smart and strategic work? And why do I believe it is critical for every one of us to give our time, our energy, our giftedness, our creativity, and our financial resources to this work? Because I believe that we are living out a way here together that matters far beyond 5, 10, and 20 years from now. I believe we are onto something as we give ourselves away by sharing space with 15 organizations here on St. Charles between Broadway and Audubon. It’s not just the physical space that matters but the vital life and work within it. What happens in here is shaping the world out there, and I am convinced that work needs to continue far into the future.
At St. Charles, we aspire to serve God by asking questions, seeking justice, loving neighbors, and welcoming all. At 121 years old this week, we’re living this in real time. We have a building with 45,000 square feet of usable space and a congregation of about 100-125 amazing, brilliant, open-hearted folks who very much DO NOT all show up for church at the same time.
So to justify maintaining this big, old building, and raising the funds to do so, the physical campus HAS to be a center for radical love, expansive spirituality, and serving the common good. All of the time. In all of its nooks and crannies. Already, we have another congregation worshipping in the hour before us right here in the same room, teaching their children the stories of faith in classrooms we are also using, serving and laughing and being church together in corridors we also walk. It’s a bit of a dance for one group to weave around the other, but we do it pretty well.
Half a dozen therapists offer mental health support from family counseling to trauma and PTSD, traditional talk therapy to walking counseling sessions to EMDR, they offer sessions out of former Sunday School and office spaces we haven’t entered in years other than to haul a file cabinet in or out.
Youth organizations, college ministry groups, one of the largest addiction recovery groups in the city, and a pro-bono law firm dealing solely in death row cases at Angola prison do life-giving and life-saving work every single day in space that would otherwise sit empty.
That is because we are not interested in preserving a museum to 20th century American Christianity. We are housing a movement of world-changing lovingkindness. The church is full and busy seven days a week embodying big, radical love in all sorts of ways that aren’t what 1950s church looked like.
I am proud to be a part of this shift in religious life. I am proud to model for other churches around the country what is possible with these large sacred structures. I am proud of you, my smart, thoughtful, creative, brave congregation; willing to take risks and grow into something that doesn’t yet quite exist. You are pioneers in this new iteration of faith community, and I am so honored to be your pastor as we walk a new stretch of road together.
And that’s the part that brings me back to the words of sacred text we first laid out for today: Jesus interrupting his grumpy disciples who want to be about the very serious and grown-up work of interpreting and debating scripture. He stops them and says, you’re missing the plot of the story here. If you think this THING we are doing together is about finessing ideas until we get the words right, then you aren’t listening to the essence of those words at all. Be interrupted! Notice the children in your midst! Delight in their questions just as I am delighting in yours! Model the love of God for them by actually loving them! Listen to the Divine gentle parent who guides your steps with bands of love and cords of human kindness. Do not turn away from the Mother God who lifts you to her cheek, from the Father God who bends down to feed you.
This Way we are about is for the living. The place we gather is not ultimately what matters, but we have been given a tremendous gift by the previous generations who dreamed this community into being in their own seasons of dreaming and discernment. They built a place for neighbors to gather and ask honest questions about life and God and marriage and justice and depression and kindness and every single thing we can name and imagine. They built a place for all people to be welcomed and loved. They built a place for people to tell the truth about their lives and free one another to do the same. They built a place to be a hub for working for the common good.
We carry on the cycle of the life and work of this church. We gather in here to be filled, sustained, and inspired, then we go out and do the work of love in the world that we’ve already practiced in our love of one another. A constant in and out; filling and pouring of vessels. The ways that work happens doesn’t look like it did in 1898 when the dreaming began. And I can guarantee our dreaming and discerning likely can’t imagine what will be 50 and 100 years from now. But if we stay faithful to the message of the radical, unending love of God that ties us not just to the Divine but to each other, if we continue the holy welcome of all, and if we keep chasing the guiding wind of the Spirit, there will be a new group of people meeting in these halls, gathering in that courtyard, loving and serving the world in Jesus’ name.
May it be so.
Amen.