Advent. Unity

We are not alone

In any of this

Despite how it feels

In the worst of this

Advent. House

our house, a few years ago

House: that thing I’ve barely been inside of recently and especially today. This is one of those days that does make me question the decision to try to write a response to words for each day in Advent.

I can caution against the busyness of this season with the best of ‘em, and fall right into it with the rest of ‘em. In just a few minutes we’re heading out again for an evening with friends.

We’ll be at their home, which reminds me that a house is not the same thing as a home. Home, as they say, is where the heart is. House is usually where the bed is. If you’re lucky, they’re the same place. I am among the truly lucky, for which I am deeply grateful.

There's so much more that could be said about connections between heart and place, buildings and space, distance and grace. But I'm going out, instead.

Advent. Raise

It's about 10:30 on a Thursday evening and I just got home from a budget and finance meeting. It's been a long day. One that began with getting up to a chilly house because the furnace is misbehaving, then included meetings stretched out over about 70 miles of driving and stacked up from 10:00 a.m. until about 10:00 p.m. Maybe I need a raise.

Actually, no. I don't. But I do need to raise awareness. That's a pastor's job. I need to raise awareness within a congregational system that proclaims sabbath as a core value but has more functional workaholics than most AA meetings have functional alcoholics. Is there a 12-step program for people addicted to busy? I'm asking seriously. 

I also need to raise awareness within congregational systems that operate on a mentality of scarcity although we live in God's economy of gracious abundance. Note the plural. This is about congregations, not just the one I currently serve. Scarcity and abundance are fine pondering coming out of a budget meeting, to be sure, and the difficult relationship between them is certainly not something close to unique to the place I currently serve.

But as the group was pondering a significant budget gap I did a bit of quick math that is specific to that church. The median household income around the church is $125,000. It would not surprise me at all to learn that the median household income in the church is more than that. Even if that figure is accurate for the church, in a congregation that has about 250 households, it doesn't take a lot of math skills to see that if each of those households contributed a Biblical tithe to the church the budget would be more than $3 million. Suffice it to say, on a budget less than two-thirds that total a tithe would way more than eliminate a budget gap that is less than $100,000.

While the figures are particular to one church, the general pattern looks a lot like the one I seen in every church I've served. I'm not casting aspersions. I know how hard it is to shape a household budget such that you can give 10 percent of your income to places of the heart. Some years we reach that goal, and other times we miss the mark. 

But it really does come down to where we choose to put our treasure, and what we wish to raise with that treasure. I want to raise the household of God, but sometimes it's all we can do to heat the house of the pastor and pay for the education of the PKs. Of course, we raised them, too, and that's not nothing.