Disappointed but not Bitter

Looks like we'll be getting a shiny new CVS pharmacy in Midtown...after a grand old church is bulldozed. This is sad on many levels -- watching an older church wither, watching Union turn into a mini-Germantown Parkway, loosing yet another beautiful building to a crappy new structure, watching politics simmer & stew, etc.

The saddest thing is the lost potential. Churches in Midtown and downtown are not just places of worship (though that is a noble purpose in itself), but rather true resources. Within a mile of Union Avenue Methodist Church you can see Union Ave Baptist hosting the new Memphis Teacher Residency Program, Idlewild Presbyterian hosting More Than A Meal, Union Ave Church of Christ hoping HopeWorks, and First Congregational home to a handful of non-profits. An adaptive re-use of Union Ave Methodist could have had incredible synergy and amazing potential for being a resource.

While I lament this loss of opportunity, I do understand the decision of the City Council to some extent: namely, that killing the sale would put an enormous burden on the congregation of Union Ave Methodist. The last 40 members have long since vacated the property which admittedly has significant problems and merged with St Luke's. In America it is hard to swallow government telling you who you can and cannot sell your own property to, and this congregation has a right to make this choice.

I do wish that there had been an open and transparent opportunity for negotiation for sale to parties other than CVS. But this is over and done with.

Meanwhile, we need to realize that are other churches in similar situations. Sadly, you can walk into scores of sanctuaries with a capacity for 200-500 and find 40 people in the pews any given Sunday morning. Union Ave Methodist said they received no support from the community for the several years they spent trying to find solutions. Probably so. How often do churches look at other churches as competitors rather than partners?

All churches and organizations, like people, have lifecycles. As megachurches sprout and grow in the suburbs and church plants pop up in the inner city, what is our duty to fellow members of the church invisible who are struggling? Where are there opportunities for support and cooperation? Perhaps in addition to foreign missions and home missions, we may also be called to support intra-church missions. What does that look like? Who knows, but it is worth thinking about.

Accentuate the Positive

Often I find myself struggling to stay focused on the positives in life. Its easy to get sidetracked with one or two looming, seemingly huge negatives amidst a sea of postives. I mean when your left knee hurts do you really stop to think that your neck, back, right knee, left hand, right shoulder, left ear, etc do NOT hurt? No, you go with the squeaky wheel or throbbing limb. Similarly if you were hypothetically worried about your, oh say, job, you could fixate and forget the good things going on with family, friends, significant others, neighborhood, retirement funds, vacation plans, favored sports teams, etc.

Recently a letter to the editor advised against a PR campaign to extol the virtues of Memphis aka the city of choice because the city has too many problems. The gist was don't spin a sow's ear into a silk purse. True, there is no reason to be deceitful about our crime, poverty, educational system, lack of job growth, litter, etc. But we still have a lot to be proud of in Memphis with a hotbed of creativity (from entrepreneurs to musicians), a vibrant cultural scene, some terrific parks and public spaces, good values on housing and overall cost of living compared to any metropolitan area in America, a amazing number of citizens who volunteer and generally help each other out, and much more.

So do you do the PR campaign or not?

I think it is like waiting for the right time to do anything else -- take a vacation, write a book, paint the living room. There is no perfect time and it you wait for the perfect time, you spend you entire life waiting. Now is what you've got. Do what you can with what you've got. Go ahead and talk about what good there is in a PR campaign and at the same also spend time & resource trying to fix what is not so good. Its a multi-tasking world in which we live, isn't it?