A Message by Dr. Green on the occasion of a Mortgage Burning.
If you need a text for this short address, you can find it in Proverbs 24:27:
Finish your outdoor work
and get your fields ready;
after that, build your house.
This is a very practical, and very wise approach to life.
When the author of the proverb said to “Finish your outdoor work and get your fields ready” before building your house, he was talking about setting priorities.
In his day it was better to live in a tent alongside a big garden that would feed your family—with some left over for the neighbors, than to live in a fine house alongside a small garden that would not even feed your family, much less enable you to give aid to your neighbors.1
Here at New Philadelphia, we carefully chose our priorities. When I arrived here more than 21 years ago, the church already had a plan for a two-stage building program.
The first stage was the educational building that now houses our offices, our preschool, our library, and our music rooms. The second stage was a larger, more modern Fellowship Hall. Though we did not know it, we were in perfect agreement with the proverb. We set our priorities. First we built the building that we thought would do the most to nourish us and feed us spiritually. Then we built the building that, at one time, some considered to be a luxury.
It was not just about buildings either. I remember a key Joint Board meeting that took place several years before we voted to build the Fellowship Hall. We were trying to decide whether we could justify it. We had an old Fellowship Hall. Would a new one truly be a necessity or a luxury? It all depended on the number of people we would put into it. We decided to delay construction of the Fellowship Hall, and start a second worship service, first. We told ourselves that, if the church grew as a result of that second worship service, then we would build the Fellowship Hall.
The church did grow, and we did build the Fellowship Hall. We needed it too. We designed it to seat 500. The first Sunday we used it, we had 700 people to a sit-down meal, and had to spread the crowd among the classrooms.
We finished our outdoor work, we got our fields ready, and then we built our house.
I believe we did it right, and the author of Proverbs would agree.
Let me extend the analogy of the house.
In his autobiography, While It Is Day, the great Quaker scholar and teacher, Elton Trueblood, talks about building a house. I think what he says also applies to building our Fellowship Hall. Trueblood says that it is better to build a house later in life, rather than sooner. He says it is only after we have lived most of our life, that the meaning and purpose of our life becomes clear to us. And it only after the meaning and purpose of life has become clear to us that we can build a house that truly suits us.
Many of those who dreamed of and worked for our new Fellowship Hall are not here today, except in Spirit. They are a part of the “Great Cloud of Witnesses”2 that cheer us on. I always wondered why so many older members of our congregation—even some greatly advanced in age, enthusiastically supported our new Fellowship Hall. What Trueblood said explains it for me. They supported it because they had become clear as to the meaning and purpose of such a building in the life of this congregation. They knew what it would mean for us.
I think it is only since we finished our Fellowship Hall that the purpose and meaning of it has become clear to us—and continues to become clear. Let me suggest just two things about what our Fellowship Hall means to us.
First, it is the center of our common life.
This sanctuary is the center of our uncommon life. It is the place where we gather together in order to worship the God of Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob. It is the place where we gather to meet with the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit. It is the place where we gather to listen for, and to be disturbed by, and comforted by, and challenged by, the Word of God. In contrast, the Fellowship Hall is where we gather together, in the sight of God, to meet with one another and talk about what we are doing with our lives in obedience to the Word of God that we have heard.
Jesus called his disciples not servants, but friends. Friends are the family that we choose. In the Fellowship Hall we explore, and deepen our friendships with one another. We don’t always know one another, but we all have a common Friend.
Second, it has become a place where we open our life to others.
I think of New Philadelphia as “the Church of the Open Door.”
I stumbled on that image long before I was the pastor. I drove by one evening and the little door over the main door of the sanctuary was open. I though it was intentional. I thought it was an open invitation for people to visit the church.
After I became the pastor here, the association grew. The angel of the Revelation writes to the church at Philadelphia, saying, “I have set before you an open door, which no man can shut.”
I felt that promise applied as much to the church at New Philadelphia as to the church at Philadelphia.
That name has been affirmed for me in our Open Door Lunch that takes place in Fellowship Hall.
The Open Door lunch is a time when we invite the world in to look us over, and decide whether we are a community of faith, or a community of fakes.
I think those who visit with us generally approve, in the same way that the people of Jerusalem once approved the fellowship of those first disciples in Acts 2.
Paul once wrote to a beloved congregation saying, “We were so affectionately desirous of you that we were ready to share with you not only the gospel of God, but also ourselves.” (1 Thess. 2:8)
It is in our Fellowship Hall where we share ourselves.
The church historian, Martin Marty, has written that the church that wins the future must be a public church with an open door. I sincerely believe we are the church of the open door.
Now let me bring this brief address to a close. In so doing I want to add to the proverb, and I think its author would approve. He writes:
Finish your outdoor work
and get your fields ready;
after that, build your house.
I would add:
After that, bring in the harvest.
We still have outside work that needs doing. Jesus said, “The Fields are white unto harvest.” Calvary Baptist will harvest some. And River Oaks Community Church will harvest some. But I believe there is a part of the harvest that will respond only to the way we Moravians present the message.
I think we are needed in the world. For that reason, though I am happy for us to burn the mortgage, I have decided to continue my gift. I am going to make it not to the Building Fund, but to the General Fund. I want to invest not just in bricks and mortal, but in the people for whom Christ died, people like you and me, who want desperately to believe that God has a plan for them, a plan for good and not for evil, to give them a future and a hope.
God does have a plan. Are you willing to help God make it happen?
I am happy to burn the mortgage, but happier still to open a new chapter in the life of The Church of the Open Door.
FINIS
Footnote:
1 Jews were expected to feed their neighbors. In Leviticus 23:22 we read: “’When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Leave them for the poor and the alien. I am the LORD your God.’ ”