by Steve Van Winkle
Pastor of Fellowship Baptist Church, Bozeman, MT
I stood on this late Saturday night in the parking lot taking in the lights flashing blue-white-red-blue-white-red and watched the smoke ooze up over the roof with a menacing determination. If the building had been 100 stories taller, it could have been the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.
It wasn’t. It was Heritage Christian School in August 2012. It was where I had watched countless events involving my kids, from sports, to singing, to last May’s graduation. It is where so much of my life had happened in the last ten years.
And, it was on fire.
It is also where Fellowship Baptist Church landed as a layover on our now eight-year building program that had seen more than its share of postponements and disappointments and emergencies of cash and congregation. We had sold our building 18 months earlier in anticipation of soon building, but as costs climbed unexpectedly, we were forced to stay in this gym longer than we anticipated.
When we began our building program, we were a healthy-appearing church in terms of attendance and finances, a church with a staff of four and with its own building it had occupied for 20 years. This Saturday night, in this parking lot, we were a church that had lost sizable percentages of people and money, had sold its building of 20 years, had plans to say goodbye to its sole remaining staff member in the morning, and had placed much of our essential equipment and future ability to meet in that gym.
And, it was on fire.
And the thought I had as I watched wasn’t a Bible verse or inspirational quote, and it wasn’t even concerned with the school itself. I simply looked up and took the whole scene in and said to myself, “Seriously?”
It’s not the stuff of inspiration, to be sure. I hope it doesn’t wind up being the title of my biography, but it seemed to be the only response I had left after all the troughs and tragedies of the last near-decade.
The spectacle had crossed the timeline from very late Saturday night to very early Sunday morning. In the dizziness of the event, I tried to account for everything that needed to be addressed before the sun rose on our routine service schedule: “Where would our church meet?” … “Would we meet?” … “How do we get the word out?” … “What would I say?” … “What next?”
Over phone lines and across the Internet, we let everyone know we would meet in my front yard. It was our only option.
People brought their lawn chairs and the food they were planning to bring to the send-off for our associate pastor, Jon, and his family. We sent people over to the crime scene that had been the location of our Sunday services to redirect people who hadn’t gotten word, and we arranged for the kids to meet at the members’ house catty-corner from us.
I retreated to a room in our home where I abandoned my entire morning’s plan. After all we had been through and all the goals we had hoped were imminent, after so many years and so many promises, I genuinely wasn’t sure what to expect from this church I pastor.
Honestly, I wasn’t sure what to expect from me, either.
In addition to being one of the most challenging (i.e. worst) summers of my life, the erosion of our situation mocked me. We had sold our building on promise of constructing a new one, and now we were meeting in my yard. I had gone from the confident leader of a major ecclesiastical venture in the form of a 30,000-square-foot construction project costing millions of dollars, to a now-exhausted guy whose only response to the latest challenge was, “Seriously?”
As the time approached to start our improvised service, I watched the people intently to gauge their spirits. On a normal Sunday, our church, like many others, has a “buzz” and a busyness to them that resembles the floor of the great Stock Exchanges of the world: musicians and singers practicing, volunteers setting up spaces, teachers making copies. If you stood in our foyer the week before, you would have watched people passing each other in a sterile hallway with cups of coffee in their hands, giving the glancing, obligatory smile as they did. You could have listened as the usual clusters of individuals talked loosely about nothing of importance.
And, what church isn’t like this? It’s not wrong, and I’m certainly not despising the details and necessities of church in our age; however, we were different on this morning. On so many Sunday mornings, we are just individual pieces of a moving machine; on this morning, we were one. We didn’t have the swagger of individuals and we weren’t thinking in consumer terms. The bulwarks of individuality were reduced to ash by the fire and on my lawn was gathered something remarkable: a congregation.
Many home Bible studies have more planning behind them than did this particular Sunday’s service. We sang one song; we had no instruments, no video projection, and no hymnals. We only remembered to take an offering afterward.
Without the instruments and walls, I listened to the stripped down, unplugged words of “Amazing Grace,” chosen in no small part because it is a song everyone knows without the words projected on a screen or typed on a page. It is a musical balm that draws our souls heavenward when the world has done all it can to drain joy from our lives and was the only song that made sense on this morning.
When I stood to preach, a neighbor was watching from across the street, and more than once people strolled by walking a dog or getting a little exercise. And before me was assembled people who appeared to be expecting a barbecue or a game of badminton; they were in assorted lawn furniture and on blankets and huddled under trees; they were wearing sunglasses; some had dressed for church, others for a morning on the lawn.
But, they were all there.
I had settled on the only thing that made sense to me that morning. I preached from Acts 8 on the Diaspora and how God uses means we wouldn’t invite into our lives to accomplish His goal of dislodging people from their complacency in order to focus them on the Great Commission. And, because God is good and perfect, we know that a great persecution was exactly what the church in Jerusalem needed at the time.
I told them it led me to conclude that God looked at our church and after years of plodding, hoping, giving, believing, and expecting, He determined that the best thing to do for us Saturday, August 25, 2012, was to have the place we were meeting in destroyed by arson and melt down all our equipment in the process.
It is so often true that we want the gain without the pain, and like our ancient brethren in Acts, we would never have invited this into our lives. I reminded people that the pain we experience in times like this is not incidental to the plan — the pain IS the plan. Putting us out on the street right now is not something that just happened … it is what God willed to happen … it is what God knows is the BEST thing to happen.
We prayed at the end. All of us. With one voice. I could hear whispers of requests, and muffled “amens” of agreement; for my part, I contributed to the sound of weeping. It was a symphony of emotion lifted up and presented to God as a confident offering of thanks for His presence and purpose. It was … inspiring … comforting … and assuring.
I lifted my head from prayer and looked out at this gathering of God’s people on my front lawn. Later, I pondered how we had gathered without media, music, schedules, organization, or a building. I wish I could say we had nobly gathered to defy the evil that burns schools and displaces churches, or that we had courageously gathered to honor the Lord Whose worship cannot be held hostage by the impulses of wicked people. But, I can’t.
The truth is that we gathered because that’s what churches do.
Being without a building is not a circumstance I would consider ideal, but it is proving true what is always said about the church: it’s not a building, it’s a people (this is usually pointed out by people whose church is in a building). This service on the green showed me something precious. It showed me again that church buildings, church projects, and church possessions can be eaten up by moth, rust, and fire, but the church remains.
And Fellowship Baptist Church remains. After nearly 30 years, it remains and gathers in yards and parks as we look for a new place to meet. We have taken offerings in refrigerator crisper trays, because our offering plates burned; we have played music around a table because our music stands were lost; we bring sunscreen to worship because we have no roof. And yet, we gather.
We gather with a large spirit and inexplicable smile while we talk a little longer. We gather and we pray more thankfully, sing more thoughtfully. We gather and we anticipate more, because God has once again made Himself the architect of our future.
I suppose if someone would have told me a month ago the next best step for Fellowship Baptist Church would be to have all its “necessities” destroyed by fire and be without a building to meet in for several weeks or a month or more, I think I would have had one response: “Seriously?”
Yes. Seriously.