A Tale of two Mindsets

          Today I’m wondering about a balance between two mindsets: “If we build it, they will come” and “if they come, we will build it.” In the first mindset, people build their ultimate field of dreams. In a church, this means putting together a program or hiring a staff person to put together a ministry. It looks like trusting the budget to hold and trusting that whatever you create, it will draw people to it. In the second mindset, people wait until there are definitely people who even want that kind of program. Once you know there are people interested, you can start building something around them. In the second mindset, building something without vested interest opens a church up to wasting time, talents, and treasures – all three important commodities in ministry.

            There’s nothing inherently wrong (or right for that matter) with either mindset. Having been in ministry for more than ten years and involved in the life of a church for more than 30 years, I see the pros and cons of both. At its core, though, you find the age old question: Did the egg come first or the chicken (the “church” equivalent of this question, by the way, is “Did Adam and Eve have bellybuttons?”)?

            So, I’m wondering about the balance. What lies in the space between creating a ministry and people showing up to enjoy the ministry?

            I’m remembering a building project in a former church. We had a group of architects come in and do a feasibility study. They examined our current space, heard our space “wish list,” and designed a space to marry the two. The result was a beautiful looking addition to the current building. It really did look nice. When we presented it to the congregation, there were a lot of questions. I remember one member saying flatly “We don’t need it.” And I remember thinking then there had to be a balance between the two mindsets of “build it and they will come” and “if they come, we will build it.”

            What I learned from that experience is to start with what you have. What we really didn’t do in that building study was explain why it was necessary. A larger sanctuary sounded nice, but was it really necessary? The Christian education area was sorely outdated but was a larger space the answer? We did not do the addition, but we did spend time thinking about what we had. We did a kind of asset mapping (a practice taking stock of current assets and forming a plan for how to use what you have right now even while you’re planning for what you might want). Asset mapping doesn’t rule out the possibility of future change; it just helps a group locate its current status and we learn to at least start with what we have. We had the space for Christian education. We used what we had to renovate the current space within the current physical footprint. 

            We also had a set of circumstances in our community change that gave us the extra push we needed to renovate the space. I hope we would have gone ahead with the changes anyway, but when we needed to improve the space to become a space for mission groups to spend the night it gave us the momentum required for any building project.

            When we start with what we have right now, it helps us focus better. When we start with what we have right now, we don’t have as much red tape to stop us from doing the next thing. We assess what resources we can use in this moment and it doesn’t feel so overwhelming. We start right now building relationships and considering what people actually want from their church life – and what do we have right now to meet those needs? What we might need in the future can be a part of the ongoing conversation. But those conversations don’t happen as smoothly unless the relationships have already begun.

            If we don’t start with what we have right now, it’s easy to get overwhelmed over what we don’t have. Starting with the right now helps us slow down. It helps us build relationships, which really are the most important thing of any church family (part of that whole “love God and love your neighbor as you love yourself” thing 😊). Starting with the right now also helps us appreciate what we have in ways we maybe didn’t appreciate it before.

            Whatever ministry we want to grow, adding a ministry or a staff person isn’t a bad thing. It may also not be a good thing. But if we don’t start with where we are in this particular moment, we may not set ourselves up to really hear how the Spirit is calling us onward.