Cruciality—the possibility of no responsibility

Every congregation has a crucial moment. The problem is that we can’t tell which moment among all the million church moments is the most crucial. Or which moments are crucial and which moments are just very important.

For us one of the most crucial moments was the choice of where we would spend our exile following the fire of December fifth of 2005.

Not every community of God’s people gets to choose where it will spend its exile. But we did. The choices after the fire were a Christian elementary school auditorium northwest of us, a Baptist church that wanted to move to an abandoned YWCA where there were two swimming pools, and a college chapel. For a variety of reasons none of them made sense.

Instead we moved our temporary worship space to a Masonic lodge which had no windows and strange symbols that we had to rationalize as part of our new world.

It was free.

We did not pause to think about what “free” really meant. 

The crucial way, the way of the cross, might have involved some measure of responsibility. We might have thought in terms of actually having bills to pay that would transfer over to the time in our new building in which we had actual bills to pay—custodial, utility and mortgage. But here we were confronted with the possibility of no responsibility. What congregation wouldn’t have taken this route?

Cruciality means not being free. It means being bound to the cross of the Crucified Christ, and such binding comes as a surprise to a church whose mind is so much in the middle of the Twentieth century. The late twentieth century American idea of being church is about comfort over the cross and we are not alone in that. The reigning idea of that post-war American church is that Christ has triumphed and we are the heirs of Christ’s kingdom.

Ground Breaking

We're breaking ground for our new church on August 19th of 2007.

Here's the backstory. Our church, the Evangelical and Reformed United Church of Christ in Waukesha, Wisconsin, burned to the ground December 4th of 2005. A Sunday night it was. About 10:15 or so. Or at least that's when I got the call from a church member who said, "Our church is burning... I mean, it's really burning." I was not yet undressed for bed, so I rushed out the door. It was a bitter cold night and I was not altogether prepared for the cold. It was a horrible night and the cause of the fire would not be revealed for some weeks.

It was finally, a carelessness on our part. We left candles burning on the communion table after a funeral in the afternoon. It had been a long day. Worship for the second Sunday of Advent at 9 a.m. then a funeral for a dear woman at 4 in the afternoon. We had a marvelous meal with her family following the service and no one went up to check to see whether or not the candles on the table had been extinguished. They weren't.

Then the youth group met at 6 p.m. and we left at 7:45. The fire had been in its infancy at that point, but there were no hard-wired smoke alarms that would have warned the youth group that a fire was in the making. We all went home.

Then the call at 10:15 and the long night of running from one fire command post to another began.

But just now we are breaking ground.