The first and easiest step to avoid bad definitions of church ownership is to stop thinking of church in a physical sense. The more you define church as a "place where" the more you get bound up in buildings and property and physical elements. Physical things are always owned in our society, usually exclusively. You own the rights to your property, the air space above it, the mineral rights beneath it...top to bottom it's yours. If you think of church like more property you will inevitably come to think that you possess it. You'll also feel threatened and frustrated when someone else evidences any sign of ownership...like moving that flower vase you set out or leaving crumbs on your floor.
Church is a living web of relationships between God and his people to which we're all connected. A spider web can't stand if there's only one string. It'll just blow away in the wind. Each strand is distinct from the next but all the strands rely upon each other to make a cohesive whole. My relationship with God supports your relationship with God and vice versa. Church forms the center connecting point of that web, the place where we're closest together. It's comprised of all of us without being owned by any of us. Relationships can't be possessed in the same way that physical things can.
The church does have physical elements, of course. But those physical things are there to serve the relationships, not vice versa. This is where the "old school" perception of church gets backwards. Once upon a time people assumed we were all there to serve the church, particularly the building. Keeping up appearances and getting the color of the carpet right were BIG DEALS. In reality the building only exists because it's hard to gather and worship when you're getting snowed on. The carpet's there to keep our feet cushy. Tables and pictures and kitchen utensils are meant to be moved based on the needs of the ministry. None of them matter as entities unto themselves. Their use determines their value. "Owning" them (in the sense of freezing them in place) destroys them.
Another handy tip to avoid the bad connotations of ownership: Ask how many times you hear "YES" in your church. Churches that are owned in the bad way hear the constant refrain of "NO". No, we can't do that. No, don't touch those. No, we do it this way here. No, things will fall apart if we try. No, nobody cares about that. No, we need to do this instead. Churches that live out mission resound with "YES". Yes, let's try it! Yes, that could be valuable. Yes, go ahead and move those around. Yes, your voice matters to us. Yes, you have something to contribute!
Churches that do this well don't even need to hear that many "Yes" answers. People just go ahead and do! Decisions aren't regulated by a bureaucracy or a small cadre of insiders whose approval you need (and seldom get). Decisions are made at the ground level by the people actually doing the work. Everybody else learns, celebrates, and follows. The church gets bigger every time a different person leads us in a new direction. People experiencing the good kind of ownership are not only free, but eager, to take us on those journeys.
Beware of phrases like "good member". Beware of the instinct to introduce yourself by sharing how long you've been a member. In fact have a healthy suspicion of the concept of membership in general. Dividing people is a covert way to establish (bad) ownership. Watch how you create "us" and "them" groups in your church. Tenure, gender, age, ethnicity, background, economic status, profession, political persuasion, beliefs...any criterion you use to separate out others makes you the owner by default.
Pay attention to your response when you disagree with something that people say or do, when you get annoyed or offended. The bad, fearful sense of ownership makes you insist upon your own way and sends you scrambling to justify all the reasons you should get it. "I've been here longer, invested more, understood God's teachings the right way!" The good sense of ownership simply acknowledges that you're walking on a different portion of the web than somebody else seems to be. But unless your string is anchored to a point on the other side of center the web's going to fall apart. Besides, there's plenty of room in the middle to gather together anyway.
Gauge how you feel when something changes. Huge changes require discussion and thought. But a different hymn every once in a while, switching liturgies every now and then, the tables moving in the fellowship hall, a fork placed in the "wrong" drawer, or somebody else sitting in "your" pew? Those won't rattle you unless you're assuming that the church is yours and not anybody else's.
During the synod assembly I attended a workshop on stewardship. We explored the definition of the word "steward". Originally the steward took care of the kingdom in the king's name without owning the kingdom himself. Nowadays nobody wants to be a steward because everybody thinks they're a king. The modern world allows us to draw our life circles so small that we've lost our sense of interdependence and thus the need to communicate with anyone outside of our personal kingdom. God's Kingdom is infinite, eternal, and beyond the control of any of us. Nobody can contain or own it. The church is supposed to be the reflection of that Kingdom on earth. It ceases to be that the moment it's owned by anyone, trading in its eternal significance for cheap control, agreement, ease, and compromise with sin and culture. That's not a good trade.
In the end, the most faithful measure of the quality of your ownership is the feeling you get when you hear the phrase "my church". Does your heart fill with love, gratitude, and excitement when you utter those words or does it evoke fear and territorial instincts? One way will leave you feeling that other people are always messing up your church. The other understands that your church can't be messed up, that each new pathway only leads you to a more comprehensive expression of God's love.
--Pastor Dave (pastordave@geneseelutheranparish.org)
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