THINKING ABOUT SUSTAINABILITY

Sustainability is one of the key words of this still very young century. We will be thinking about it more and more in days to come.

We are learning how to live so that there are adequate resources left for the other seven billion people. We are learning how to reduce our carbon footprint, so as to curb global warming and keep the planet healthy and habitable for centuries to come.   We are learning how to offer excellent and reasonable healthcare to an aging populace in ways that do not bankrupt our society. And we are learning how to live in faith community in a far less cash-intensive manner, making possible a lighter, more agile Christian movement, with a greater ability to invest beyond our own internal buildings and management.

Americans have a less-than-stellar reputation around the world when it comes to good stewardship of resources. Almost everything we do, we do in a manner that consumes more energy and costs more money than any other nation, doing the same things.

On one issue after another, this century will bring a time of reckoning for us, and force us to rethink most of what we do in life, as we face a parade of crises: economic, environmental, social and spiritual.

In the case of Christianity - the mega-church is here to stay, and many such churches will build expansive facilities to house their ministries.  But in urban settings worldwide, real estate will soon grow so expensive that almost no church buys land anymore.  Most twenty-first century churches will seldom gather more than 100 worshipers, even if those same churches may be multiplying like crazy. The model of the full-time seminary-trained pastor and the five-plus acres of land with a building simply will not work for most of the churches we are planting, and for most of the churches that will renew their ministries for the next few decades.  Among long-existing churches (some of them formerly mega-churches) many of our feistiest and most tenacious churches in the years ahead will be leaner than they used to be - with far less building and staffing needs than once they had.

It is an era for massive re-thinking around how we do church.

There is a way for any size church to be sustainable in any economic circumstance. Period. Another way of saying it is that there is a workable financial plan for any church in any era, in any financial context. (Churches are not like people, for whom a minimum wage is necessary to avoid poverty and suffering.)

Among the fallacies that must be named:

• We can no longer afford the building we are in, so we have no choice but to disband.
• We can no longer afford seminary-trained union-wage clergy, so we have no choice but to disband.
• Owning property is always a better investment than a long-term lease.
• We need seminary-trained pastors to provide adequate care for an aging church membership.
• We need a paid youth worker in order to offer a dynamic and constructive youth ministry.
• We can gather enough funds for ministry in a casual approach, without challenging our people to biblical (and somewhat radical) notions of Christian commitment.

Each of the above statements is false.

Churches will always need places to meet. And paid staff will be with us for the long haul: important ingredients to effective ministry in many places. But the ways that we house ministry and supply staff will certainly change radically in the days ahead.