It's 1:46am... I just woke up from an interesting dream- I don't have many like this, photo-realistic, emotionally charged and engaging, so when I do, I pay attention- and they always (ach- "always"... three times now) seem to be about evergreen.
Anyway, the long and the short of it was this- we were using an old church building to do some kind of gathering in- perhaps a prayer time, but not one of our Sunday morning gatherings. As we walked through the medium sized building and past all the old Sunday school rooms off the main sanctuary area, each filled with museum-quality church junk (no one had changed the displays on the walls in years- it was somewhere between charming/cool and downright creepy), I began to be filled with a number of feelings- anger that this cool space was being used as a respository for some community's history (interesting that history is one of our core values), interest (I of course was seeing the potential in the space) and frustration... frustration that no one would ever in a million years give us a building like that... that whatever small group of 10-20 seniors was still rattling around in that place would wait until the last of them was about to go, and hand it back to some denomination ( I think I said "damned denomination" to the person who was walking near me and who I was explaining this to in my dream) who would liquidate it to buy another couple of years for the solvency of their Bureaucracy...
The floor was that old, dark tile stuff you see in ancient Baptist churches, shiny and hard. The walls were tan plaster and dark wood. The ceiling in the sanctuary was wood paneling and very cool. There were ancient fixtures on the walls- light up signs to tell you how many were there last week, what hymn, etc. They hadn't been used in years. The seats in the sanctuary were an old type of fold down theatre seating- I got the feeling this had once been a fairly progressive, thriving church...
As the main group went on, I got sidetracked by a room with two grand pianos, an upright and some kind of old, electric, windpipe organ contraption. I sat and played a few notes on the organ before moving back out of the room to the rest of the group.
While I was distracted, a discussion had started without me. Apparently, the group that owned the building was in arears of some kind, a very, very small amount, and had approached "us" on taking over the building from them (I put "us" in quotes, because in the dream, this was the first I was hearing of it). There was some interest from the group, but also some negative feelings... and since this is evergreen (well, Dream Evergreen anyway- I didn't recognize but one or two people (Jim and Kathleen Schoene, why are you in my dreams???)), we moved from the now-larger-than-before main sanctuary to a side chapel kind of thing (more like a big classrom with graduated stadium seating and old desk seats that I had the feeling had been a choir rehearsal space) to talk about it...
The oddest thing- others were leading the discussion... I was content to let them talk, though, as they did, I got more and more angry. Angry that if we didn't take advantage of this opportunity, this great building would end up being an insurance agency or (my actual dream words that I said to someone near me) some "freakin' Unitarian church"...
As people talked, I itched to get up and describe what could happen in that space- the food pantry and clothes closet for the poor, the way we could house some people there with the showers downstairs.... how we could pull out the seats, get some couches and Solomon's Porch the place... I could instantly see what a center for goodness that place could be and how we could serve the neighborhood out of and through it, and how the Gospel could continue to be lived out and preached in and through and out of that place...
But people were talking, mostly hearing the details from a couple of people who took the floor up front, and someone I was next to urged me to wait to say anything. It was odd, it was as though a group of people had really prepared well for this- had discussions with the members of the aging church, did some research into what was owed, what it would take to fix up the place, and they were facilitating the discussion. The odd part was that they hadn't talked to me about this or even acknowledged my presence in the room up to this point... That made me feel... hmmm... left out? Disrespected? Disrespected, I think...
At any rate, that's where I woke up.
Do I think someone's going to offer us a building? I wish! But I know that paradigm shift that would require for us though, and to be honest, we're not ready. We need to be living missionally as a community here in the city of portland before having a building would be more of a positive resource for ministry than a negative drain on community mojo...
No, dreams are about the feelings more than the details, I think...
Maybe more on this later, after some sleep...
But Jesus said to him, "Follow Me, and let the dead bury their own dead."
Your angst about the fate of that building? When you're ready, any building will do.
Posted by: mr bob | July 05, 2006 at 07:44 AM