Dreams Cost Money

Passion can be blinding when it comes to love, causing us to see very narrowly. The infatuated couple that have no job, no family support, and are burdened with their own personal baggage are convinced that their love will keep them in this same place of relational bliss, no matter what. Yet, within a short time the constant calls from the creditors, the moody moments each one eventually will experience, and even the simple duties of cleaning the dishes cause the passion to dim. Now they want out. They may even claim that one or both parties have changed in some unfavorable way. But usually neither have really changed. Reality worked its magic, passion waned, now they can see clearly what they were facing the whole time. Now they see what others might have seen from the beginning. The blinders are removed and clarity has come.

The effects of blinding passion can work in other arenas as well. When we set out on a task or a project that we are passionate about, radically underestimating the cost, or when we pursue a career or assignment thinking we know the scope of the project and the players involved only to be surprised that there are more dynamics then we imagined, we fall prey to blinding passion. How much has the dynamic of blinding passion effected church planting in American culture? How much is it creating a mask of delusion over the emergent, post-modern church and its leaders? How much are we missing cultural realities while trying to advance our passion? And all these questions are assuming that our passion is pure.

In my own church planting experience I can identify several areas where I either foolish refused to count the cost or where I just felt so strong about a value that I pushed forward with it at the neglect of other realities. How about the hardest blinding of all to overcome, I denied a real factor of church life because of my passion against its distorted use in the past. There are many points where my passion blinded me from issues about: buildings, children's ministry, fundraising, infrastructures, etc. In my passion to be uncompromisingly pure to my ideals, I missed some important realities.

Those that persevere and succeed are those that are willing to keep in pursuit of their goal after the luster has faded. It is those that are willing to modify their context and to adapt as they build community. In order to fulfill our purpose we must accommodate some realities we would have liked to ignore. One of these realities is the economic factor in a culture or subculture.

Cross cultural missionaries have come to understand this. They don't try to build church buildings or establish structures that cannot be sustained by the local economic condition. If they do then there will have to be a constant flow of assets from outside of that region. And in most cases dependency is considered too significant of a deficit within the faith community to establish a system that requires it.

What I see in the emerging church is small numbers. Yes, great ideas, great values, attention to the what is coming, but for now the numbers are small. In fact the very designs we are framing to express our values limit the number of people that can or will cluster together. It seems we want our cake and eat it too. We want to deconstruct the traditional church to advance our values, but we want the financial freedom of the traditional church to have full time staff members as well as other resources. We will continue to hit a wall if we don't acknowledge the reality of the economics of building and sustaining community in an American culture.

Consider the success of the Methodist circuit rider and the rural Baptist church. These faith groups planted hundreds of churches across America, impacting large percentages of the population for a number of years. In the case of the circuit riders. Their strategy matched the economics of the culture they were reaching. One full time person served multiple communities of faith. Meetings out in the open air were the culturally the norm and so they were used. Buildings came later and they came slowly. The use of tangible assets were minimal so the demand for assets were small. The same is true of the rural Baptist movement. Their design depended heavily on layity and their cultural target had very few resources and required very few material resources.

Yet, here we want to work with small groups of people, with big appetites for resources. We design and desire to have fulltime pastors and fulltime worship leaders. We, and I would add our cultural target, want high tech tools, high quality art, high quality programming. Is our design and our desires ignoring the economics involved? Maybe I am being cynical, but maybe the cloudiness of passion has cleared enough for me to see something that is really there. I believe our passion for our design of church has blinded us to the reality of paying for it. So we either need to change our design or find a sugar daddy that we will leach off of.

I don't really like the sugar daddy idea. So what changes can be made? There are two areas we can attack: our expectations or our cultures expectations. Let's consider our culture first. Can we, and do we want to, train our culture to want less in quality. Can we return to the below average quality of the wide spread kingdom advances of the Methodists and Baptists? Is that possible in our affluent culture? At some point we would have to train them to interact in a different language of culture. Maybe if we were stranded on desert island with no internet connection we could change their cultural language and then get down to the church community. It seems futile. American culture is what American culture is and we need to learn their language. So technology, quality, childcare, and buildings are here to stay.

So what about our expectations? Are we all willing to go get jobs in the marketplace and do church leadership on the side? I know that there are people that strongly advocate abandoning full time Christian workers or leaders. But I think this is neither biblical, historical, or practical. It is nothing but blind passion for an idea. Especially in American culture, I don't know that we can or that we want to. I for one don't want to work at two professions and try to raise my family. For some the bi-vocational arrangement might work, but I think the requirements to serve our faith communities are too demanding. Now, there are rural communities that still function at a slow pace with little demand. There are sub-cultures in America that expect less and could be done part time. But those places and opportunities are shrinking with each passing season.

This is another reason to hammer out the specifics of the multi-congregational campus and the spreading of evangelical monasteries. Both provide a possible solution to the economic realities. Monasteries house workers and foster community. Multi-congregational campuses can offer low cost, high quality overhead. I don't want the reality of economics to slow down the progress of the emergent church.