Party on High Street!

Today was a big day! After a full year of praying, discerning, researching, hoping, imagining, and exploring, we finally signed on the dotted line, and we now have a new home for worship and ministry!

Two-and-a-half years ago, after decades of decline, the small congregation of Chestnut Street United Methodist Church sold its historic facility -- a National Register of Historic Places property with a sanctuary with seating for 850, 44 rooms, a gymnasium, a separate office/chapel building, apartments, and a good-sized parking lot, all next to City Hall -- and rather than experiencing this as a death sentence, instead chose life and began to imagine a new kind of ministry.

When Sara and I began our appointment here as co-pastors in July 2007, we added a new dimension to the adventure by covenanting with them to provide pastoral leadership while also planting a new community of faith. That new church start, soon to celebrate the first anniversary of its inaugural gathering, we call New Light, and together, Chestnut UMC and New Light are moving into the future as partners in ministry and mission.

Already the two communities share pastoral leadership. We've begun to imagine some shared ministries, and certainly parallel and complementary ministries. And starting today, we also share a facility. Chestnut UMC will hold its Sunday morning worship services in this new home on High Street. New Light will continue to be made up of LIFE Groups that meet in people's homes, but we'll begin a public Sunday evening worship gathering monthly as soon as the new facility is ready, and then in March, a weekly Sunday evening worship gathering.

We're working with an architect to finalize plans for some renovations to open up the space and make it a bit more accessible, so it will be a while before we can begin to use it fully. When it's complete, it will include a main gathering space with seating capacity for about 75; an office; two children's rooms, a good-sized kitchen, and two restrooms.

Here's what I wrote in a letter to the congregation:
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It is our great joy to join Rev. Mike Davis, Tri-State District Superintendent, in giving authorization for the purchase of 185 High Street, Unit 6, as a new home for worship and ministry for Chestnut United Methodist Church and New Light.

Let this new facility be called…

• a launching pad for mission and ministry
• a house of hospitality and hope and healing
• a neighborhood center
• a place where children are always welcome
• a testament to the prayer and discernment of a faithful remnant
• a sanctuary for encountering God
• a symbol of resurrection and new life
• a classroom for out-of-the-box thinking
• a safe place for exploring the way of Jesus
• a home for open hearts, open minds, and open doors
• a breeding ground for peace and justice
• a shelter for the dispossessed
• a living room for building community
• a witness to the power of the Holy Spirit

Let it never be called a fortress, a club for insiders, an island disconnected from its neighbors, a museum celebrating the past, or a place where people go through the motions.

The prophet Jeremiah conveys God’s words of assurance to God’s people: “For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope” (Jer. 29:11). This purchase marks the beginning of a new chapter of ministry, and the future is filled with hope!

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If you're the praying sort, we'd really appreciate your prayers as we begin this new adventure. It opens up a lot of possibilities for incarnational ministry as we literally move into the neighborhood. Of course, it also ushers in a host of new challenges. But we trust that the same God who has guided us to this place will surely guide us through the challenges that lie ahead, and for that we are thankful.

If you're in the Portland area, we hope you can join us for a big ol' celebration when we officially open the doors -- and then join us as we move out of the four walls and into the city, renewed in spirit, re-energized for ministry and mission, ready to serve, ready to learn from our neighbors, and ready to be the Body of Christ in the world.

Called to Ministry

Almost two and a half years ago, the established church we serve sold their enormous facility - a sanctuary with seating for 850 people, 44 rooms, a full-sized gymnasium, several apartments, and a separate office building with a chapel - to a developer who built a six-story condominum complex in the parking lot. The small remnant congregation has been meeting for worship in a synagogue on Congress Street, at the invitation of that congregation, while undertaking an intentional process of discernment. Although there has certainly been plenty of nostalgia about the past, this new building-free identity has also opened up lots of new possibilities! Without an aging, outdated building tying up all its time and financial resources, the congregation has felt a refreshing freedom to focus on ministry, and to consider an entirely new identity apart from its physical structure.

Since last fall, we've been meeting weekly with a group of leaders of the congregation, to continue this discernment process and to get serious about articulating a vision for a new and very different kind of ministry in Portland. We've met with city leaders, pastors and leaders of other churches, and leaders of social service organizations. We've gone on several field trips to visit the sites of other organizations doing work to care for people in need, both within and beyond Portland. It's been an exciting process.

After months of researching needs and opportunities for ministry within the city, in February we identified the neighborhood where where we feel led to sink down some roots. It happens to be the most densely populated square mile in the State of Maine - a neighborhood of mostly several-family homes and apartments, some of them in serious need of renovation, many of them rented out by landlords who live in other parts of the city or even out of state. It's a neighborhood with a reputation for drug use and trafficking, as well as prostitution and domestic violence -- all of which are still present, but expressed in more subtle ways than they used to be. Since it is the most affordable neighborhood in the city, it tends to be one of the places where recent immigrants and those who are recently homeless settle, but residents also tend to be very transient, moving on when they can afford to go elsewhere. It's also a neighborhood where students and some young professionals have chosen to live, and where a neighborhood center and a community policing program have had a very positive impact. Our vision for ministry in this neighborhood is taking shape, and although we have a lot of work to do to implement the vision - including talking more with people who live in the neighborhood to determine if our vision really meets a need they feel - we are hopeful and excited to get on the ground.

Yesterday at our weekly meeting of the team, an 82-year-old woman who's a relatively new member of the church and an active member of this team, said, "I've been praying that I live long enough to see this vision become a reality, because this is the first time in my life that I've ever felt called to something."

How powerful is that? We had a great discussion about that sense of being called, and I've been living with that comment ever since. Wow. God is good!

Storing Up Treasures (and Trash)

Tomorrow morning, a group of people from the church we serve (the established "mother" church, that is -- some of you know we're pastoring this congregation as well as planting a new church) will be meeting at the warehouse where we have five tons -- yes, 10,000 pounds -- of things in storage.

The congregation sold its building about two years ago. It was a mammoth facility on the National Register of Historic Places: 44 rooms, a sanctuary with balconies on three sides and seating for 800, a full-sized gymnasium, and an office complex... all this in the center of the city, right next to City Hall, with a much coveted parking lot to boot. The problem was, like so many urban churches, the congregation had dwindled, over several decades, until there were only 25 or 30 people left. Yes, that's right: more rooms than people.

So they made the agonizing decision to sell their facility and re-envision themselves. For churches, and probably for most groups, identity and physical space are so intimately interconnected... This has forced the congregation to reimagine itself, to consider its identity apart from the facility that was its home for generations. We continue to work through the grief even as we anticipate a new future. Through all of this, we're discovering the incredible power of nostalgia to paralyze, and also the freedom and the opportunities that emerge when the albatross around the neck can be discarded. Now we're free to make decisions about the future based on visions for ministry rather than the never-ending maintenance needs of an enormous, historic facility. Oh, it's so tempting to see the scarcity, but there's also abundance in this -- like life, it's a complicated mix of both.

So tomorrow we'll visit the warehouse to make some deferred decisions. What to keep? What to discard? As they tell the story, they describe how, when they were preparing to sell the building two years ago, they filled the gymasium, literally, with furniture and filing cabinets and artwork, pews and dishes and boxes and boxes of records, much of which they sold or gave away to other churches and interested individuals. Some things they sold to an appraiser. Physically and emotionally, it was an overwhelming process. What was left, they loaded into moving vans and transported to a warehouse, where it's been stored all this time in four big vaults, in case we might need it someday. It's a bit fuzzy what's actually in there, and by all accounts, they've survived for two years without needing any of it, so tomorrow we'll open those vaults and decide what -- if anything -- we might want for our future ministry.

No criticisms here. Isn't letting go always a process? How many of us have closets and attics and basements and garages and storage units bulging with the "things" we've accumulated, much of which we're storing for the day when it might be useful? I'll confess when Sara and I moved here in July, we loaded our moving van with way too many things. Much of it still lies in unopened boxes that we'll someday need to sort through. How tempting it is to hold onto things, and how powerful is the force of nostalgia! Even more, how easy it is to be held captive to our things, most of which we know, in our heart of hearts, that we do not need.

Didn't Jesus caution us about this when he said, "Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal"? And then these words, that represent a scandalous truth: "For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also."

Five tons sounds like a lot. I'm curious to see what's in there, and a bit anxious about how it will go tomorrow as we gather with competing ideas about what's really important. But those words keep coming back to me: "For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." I have a feeling God has a spiritual message for us in here somewhere -- perhaps a message about the spiritual consequences of holding on and the freedom of letting go. I hope we're open to receive it.

And who knows? Maybe when it's all said and done, it will be time to tackle some of those unopened boxes in our basement...