We Should See Other Blogs

I wrote this today after church, with the old hymn in the back of my head. It’s a pretty good tune, too, if I do say so myself. A little out of character compared to what I normally write, but I’m branching out…

Who is on the Lord’s side? Who will brave the flood?
Covered in his mercy, covered in his blood.
Who is on the Lord’s side? Who will lift the cross?
Suffer any torture, suffer any loss.

Will you not sacrifice your broken and wayward heart,
your money, your mind, your art, your all?

Give him everything that you are.
Offer everything that you are.
Give him everything that you are
and he will lift it up,
he will lift you up.

Today in church we had the news passed down to us that Freshwater Christian Church of Mississauga is going to be merging with Churchill Meadows Christian Church, also of Mississauga. I say “merging with” in lieu of the probably more apt phrase, “absorbed by”, considering that they’re the much larger church.

From a purely financial point of view, it makes a lot of sense (though this is not the only point of view from which it makes sense, I hasten to point out). Churchill Meadows is about five times or so the size of Freshwater, and has reached a point of fiscal maturity and sustainability, it would seem, so much so that they’ve been raising money for the last three years for and developing the plans for a building in which to meet. Freshwater — at least from what I saw today in the budget — has not reached a point of financial sustainability, such that the church is still gobbling up its initial setup fund. Solvent as far as I can tell only because of that fund. Freshwater gains financial stability in that they no longer have to worry about going into the red all the time. Churchill Meadows gains that extra 150 or so people that will frankly enable them to reach their building goal that much quicker. From a surface view of this all these seem to be the primary organisational benefits, without considering the obvious missional opportunities that a building and a less spread out staff entail.

I footnote that paragraph with my own experience of churches going broke: The Bridge, a wonderful place while it was still up and running, before it lost most of its congregation minus of course the core that started it. The Bridge was in the process of merging with 247 (if I recall the name correctly), when pastoral and leadership concerns put the kibosh on the whole deal, leading inevitably to The Bridge’s slow decline and finally its insolvency. When The Bridge finally closed down shop it left quite a few people with nowhere else to go, including some new converts who were very fresh to Christianity. It was, on the whole, a bad deal all around. Had The Bridge simply merged with 247 or some other like-minded church, I feel they would have been able to keep their ministry alive, give the people they sheltered a place to go, and especially provided the pastoral care for those new Christians. The Bridge closing its doors was, like I said, just a bad deal. I don’t fault anyone for this, but it was hasty, with the announcement coming a mere week before the organisation folded.

This merger is a little different, of course. We’re not closing down shop, Joel isn’t going anywhere, and we’re not about to disperse into the cold night never to see eachother again. It in fact prevents those things from happening. Which is a good thing in my view. The merger is also taking place with plenty of time in the interim: the churches are separate until October, when they’ll join at Freshwater’s current location. This gives us a lot of time to work out all those nasty little human problems that seem to occur whenever two organisations of any kind merge. For instance, I’m part of the worship team right now, playing keyboards every other week, and it occurs to me that Churchill Meadows also has a worship team. We’re really good (if I do say so myself; it’s not me, really, as much as Candace and Tim), but you have to expect that a church of 500 or so people has a better base from which to draw talented people. I raise this as an issue in particular because musicians, yes even Christian musicians, are generally a little more sensitive in the ego area than your average Joe off the street. When you try to merge two groups of people who both have separate synergies, you may end up finding that they don’t work as well together as they do apart. Or at least that the time it takes for two groups of musicians to get used to eachother can exceed your expectations. This might not even be a problem of course. I myself don’t have to play. I’ve gone to churches for a long time that didn’t need another pianist. Thankfully there’s a lot of time to work through this in people’s heads: I think the time-frame the leadership teams have chosen is a wise one. If there are any bruised egos, hopefully this will give them time to heal.

I’m writing this mostly to process it for myself. It’s going to be weird, seeing how every time I start attending a church something big changes. For instance, Living Waters got a new building and became an entirely different church almost overnight, it seemed. The Bridge shut down out of nowhere. Now Freshwater is merging, sort of losing its identity. This is fine; unless Jim (I think his name is) turns out to be some sort of heretic, or the church is just downright unfriendly and doesn’t have the missional heart I love so much about Freshwater, we’ll stick around. It’s not any further out of our way than Freshwater is. A different highway.

The losing identity does sort of bother me, though. I like Freshwater the way it is, relaxed, full of great people, and with absolutely amazing music. And when Churchill Meadows comes along, it does follow that the smaller church will lose its identity to the larger one. What that identity will end up being is left to the hands of God, I suppose. I guess I also have a certain amount of apprehension about what this new church will feel like: It’s so very hard to find a God-honouring, God-glorifying church that isn’t too backwards and isn’t too cool-whoring. When you do find such a place, seeing it being subsumed in another church that may or may not operate along the same lines is a bit like gambling, it would seem. I don’t know these people. I don’t know their modus operandi.

Now, those are just my feelings after hearing about it for the first time. I’m sure I’ll read this in a few weeks and months and wonder what the fuss was about. In the meantime, there are lots of good thing about this that I feel like I’ve accidentally de-emphasised.

Have a building is a great thing, or can be a great thing. I’ve know churches to build a nice, modern place to operate out of and then squander it trying to keep it safe and pristine and comfortable. If you have a building, use the sucker! And I have every confidence that Freshwater, with a building, a bunch of extra people, and a Joel with some time on his hands, will do great things with the building. Joel mentioned a few ideas he had, all of which sounded exactly like what a church is supposed to be doing in the world, being the hands and feet of Jesus, as he says. Give Joel a building, and I’m sure he can whip something up in a hurry. (By the way, Joel, if you ever read this, I’d suggest credit counseling for the community at large; debt is a whore who won’t wake up and leave.)

The new church, whatever its name is, will also have a greater opportunity to contribute on the modern mission field by planting another church to replace the one being lost to mergers and acquisitions. And this time, they have an opportunity to get rid of this half-assed toss-the-hatchling-out-of-the-nest trust fund approach that inevitably leads to fiscal, spiritual, and physical burnout. They — or we, I guess — have an opportunity to be a real mother church, to be there in terms of money and people power, so that those labouring in the word and in the community don’t have to constantly feel like a shyster shaking down the congregation for money, a juggler with too many balls in the air, and a prayer warrior with no time to pray. Can I suggest a radically under-churched area? Okay, how about at about Bloor and Dixie? There are tens of religions and thousands of people in that area alone, and the churches in the neighborhood are old and dying out with no new blood to replace the septuagenarian blood that has long ago grown thin. That’d be a great area, only 15 minutes away, that simply begs for a minor revival. Just an idea.

I could go on, but you get the idea. I’m liking what I see so far, and Laura and I will keep the two churches and their imminent merger in prayer. The way I see it, the human interactions are like gears, and prayer is like grease. Or something like that. It’s not a very good metaphor.

What shall we do with him, the Watcher intones with a shake of the head. What shall we do with him.
I do not know, says another, but we have to do something. Anything, really.
Shall we teach him a lesson, asks yet another. Something to stick with him. Or in him.
Something obvious, the first replies.
No, something that befits his occupation. Something… ambiguous.
Or, says the first, both.

My first stroke of what I like to call bad luck comes as I am driving under an overpass. While driving to work, merrily minding my own business, traffic slows to a crawl. I curse the sudden deceleration and my decision to go in late. Frustrated, I turn up the radio loud enough that I am unable to hear the metal rending above me as guardrails disintegrate. A large chunk of granite has come loose from its moorings, has separated from its flatbed fellows, and has inexplicably and inexorably bounded tip over tail from truck to tailgate to pavement and finally come to rest on the hood of my car. I am miraculously unharmed, as my car is idling in the centre lane. My car is the exact opposite, completely totaled, the hood crumpled, the engine burst at its seams, the fenders scattered across the freeway.

At first I am under the impression that I have been hit with a meteor and that I will immediately become famous. I am under this impression until it resolves that meteors are not made of granite, and were they made of granite, would almost certainly not be in the form of a fractured human face. When I find out at the precinct that they believe the head is part of a pre-fabricated statue of Eris, I am equal parts amusement and disbelief.

I do become famous, for at least one news cycle, until it becomes apparent that the particular statue of Eris which cut tragically short my Corolla’s legendary Japanese lifespan has been stolen from a museum. Suddenly my car becomes a symbol of the destructive power of human greed and imported automobiles. It becomes a target upon which to drop all manner of vitriol. I become rather embarrassed of the incident.

This seems a story one might tell to ones grandchildren. A close brush with death. An unexpected hood ornament. Such a story might be passed down from generation to generation, were I not the last of a long line.

My second bit of bad luck seems to have doomed me to be the last of that long line forever. In my haste to create for myself a career impervious to downturns in the economy, it seems I have forgotten to beget for myself any seed. My forest is barren of seedlings. I am a lone patch of oak, soon to be felled. I come home that day, much too calm for my own good, enceinte with mortality, determined to have Stella, my girlfriend, enceinte with my escape from that mortality. My Darwinian instinct to further my own bloodline finally rises to the surface, escaping the educated urban trappings that have kept a foot on its head for so long. My genes long to be set free to propagate into the world.

I have forgotten ever wanting a child. I have also forgotten that I was quite a jackass. I come home to an empty house, the furniture removed, picture-sized unsullied bits of wall revealing their nakedness, Stella gone, and only a refrigerator remaining. It is stocked with beer, none of which I trust. She has not left a note. She has simply not left anything all. Everything that can easily be removes has, it seems, been easily removed.

I call my friends to find out where Stella is, but they won’t tell me a thing. They seem less my friends than ever, and I recall that they are all Stella’s friends, that I don’t have any friends. I begin to remember I dislike most of these people; the ones I can stand are inert to the point of coma. They tell me things like, Oh, she finally left you. She’s been thinking about this for years. They say, Yes, well, what did you expect, working those hours? Ben, the most honest of the circle of emotional butchers, is more direct. You’re sterile, he says. You can’t get it up. And you’re a bit of a self-important moron, too. No wonder she left. I am not pleased to find out that Stella has passed that bit of misinformation around like a golden football.

Later on that night I find out that I am most certainly not sterile, that I most certainly can get it up, but I do not have a video camera handy and do not think these now former friends of mine would appreciate that particular gesture. I lay on the hardwood floor where a spectacular rug once bode its time looking expensive and collecting depreciative stains. I don’t undress or shower or cover myself with anything. My clothes are gone, the showerhead is gone, the lightbulbs are gone. The sunset is particularly spectacular, as if to counterbalance my life with its ostentatious colours. I am not impressed. As I fall asleep, it ocurrs to me that there is another day just around the corner though this does nothing to comfort me.

Do you think he has it yet, a Watcher asks.
No, another replies. No way he’s got it. Keep at him.
Let him recover for a day, the first Watcher says in his infinite wisdom. Then we can hit him when he tries to get back up.
Not particular sporting, another Watcher snorts.
When, the first says, have we ever been sporting.

If you’re going to make a great product, you need to allow me to do what I like with it. That means that I can simply grab my files from your USB device by copying and pasting them like any other file. I do not want to have to use your (Mac and Linux incompatible) software (which isn’t very good anyways) to grab (my) files from the (my) device.

I do not want my files to be in a non-standard, proprietary format. I want them to be in a free format, or barring that, a well-known, well-implemented format.

Otherwise your device is just another annoying black box that will never live up to its full potential; it will also turn its owner off your products (it did for me).

Or, barring all of that, at least say on your website that you have to jump through all these hoops. That would be nice.