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Church and Main is a podcast at the intersection of faith and modern life. Join Pastor Dennis Sanders as he shares the stories of faith interacting with the ever-changing world of the 21st century.
Music.
Hello and welcome to Church in Maine, the podcast at the intersection of faith
and modern life. I'm Dennis Sanders, your host.
Church in Maine is a podcast that looks for God in the midst of issues affecting
the church and the larger society.
You can learn more about the podcast, listen to past episodes and donate by
checking us out at churchinmaine.org or churchinmaine.substack.com.
And consider subscribing to the podcast on your favorite podcast app and leave
a review. That that helps others find this podcast.
So I actually have a new episode coming up this week that you will be hearing
about a Lutheran congregation in the Minneapolis-St.
Paul area that got involved in helping to provide housing for those experiencing homelessness.
But as I was preparing that interview, you.
I looked back and remembered another interview I did at another Lutheran church.
This is what happens when you live in Minnesota, which has lots of Lutherans,
is of a church that the pastor went there initially, at least by the synod thinking
that he was there to be a hospice pastor,
there to close the congregation, a congregation that has seen better days. But that didn't happen.
In fact, it has thrived.
And so I was thinking about this episode, when I thought about this episode
that I did back in December of 2021.
It reminded me just of the recent episode I did with Graham Bocott about St.
Anne's Anglican Church in Ontario.
And this is in some ways a similar story, a story of a church that a lot of
people had given up for dead and yet is still alive.
So I thought I would share this interview again,
and especially for those pastors who are leading small congregations or congregations
that are maybe looking for a second chance.
And so this is an interview that I had back in December of 2021 with the pastor
of Peace Lutheran Church in Lauderdale,
Minnesota, which is kind of
a small little burg that is nestled in between Minneapolis and St. Paul.
And I had an interview, a great interview there with Pastor Dave Greenland,
kind of about his story, how he came to Peace Lutheran, and the changes that
took place in that community.
So, I will go ahead and let you listen to this and just let you know,
early on I do talk about the podcast being called En Root, and it's kind of
like the one I did a few episodes ago.
That was the old name for the podcast. So that's kind of where that name comes from.
But without further ado, here it goes, this interview I had with Pastor Dave
Greenland of Peace Lutheran Church in Lauderdale, Minnesota back in December 2021.
Music.
Hello and welcome to En Root, the podcast that is a journey of faith in modern life.
Well, it is December. I hope that you have had a good Thanksgiving and that
you're entering into the season of Advent.
This is Dennis Sanders, your host. This is the podcast where we explore the
who, where, why, what, and how of religion and other topics.
So what's going on today? Well, tell me if you've heard this one before.
There's this mainline Protestant congregation in some city or suburb.
It might be about 60 years old, it could be 120 years old.
The kind of good old days of this congregation were in the 1960s and 70s,
when the church had maybe about 800 members and had two services every Sunday.
Then in the 1980s, the church started to lose members. It was just a few people
at first, but then it accelerated.
There were families that left, but there were also older members,
some that died and some that could no longer make it to church.
There were a lot of different things that were tried in order to maybe turn
things around, but nothing really worked.
By 2010, the church that had once had 800 members in 1967 now had about 80 members.
The church that was once bursting at the seams now feels empty.
The remaining members are starting to wonder how much time they have until they'll
have to close the doors of the church.
Now, this scenario or something like it has been played out over and over again
in congregations around the country.
Churches are dealing with declining membership and declining budgets,
and just like this fictional church, they wonder, how long do they have until
they have to hold their last worship service?
Doesn't have to be that way. Peace Lutheran Church is a congregation of the
Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
It's located in the small town of Lauderdale, which actually kind of lodged
between Minneapolis and St. Paul.
When Pastor Dave Greenland was asked to pastor the congregation,
he was basically told by the Synod office that he may have to be the hospice
pastor for the congregation,
the person that was going to allow and help lead the church to die a good death.
That was in 2004.
Peace is still alive. It's still kicking, and it's even grown a bit.
So in this episode, I get to chat with Reverend Greenland,
and it's about the story of peace, how it learned to connect with the community
around it, and actually how it learned to be dead in order that it could be resurrected.
Let's listen to Dave Greenland.
Music.
It's good to have you on this podcast Dave. Yeah, it's good to be here. Thanks for inviting me.
Well, I think the first thing to ask is a little bit about your own background
as a pastor, Lutheran pastor, and then a little bit about the church itself. Yeah.
All right. Yeah, so I'm from the inner city of Chicago and was Lutheran my whole life as a kid.
Just happened to be the church that our family lived closest to
um and uh um with
you know a single mom and and uh um
and grandparents and um I went
to a Lutheran college in South Dakota um South Dakota because it was far enough
away and uh something different culturally and and uh uh when it came time for
me to um go to seminary um I decided that I had been steeped in the Lutheran
tradition for so long, I needed something different.
I needed to see what the world was, as far as Christianity went.
And so I went to I love school of theology and Methodist school in Denver. Okay.
And then when I got a taste of the Methodists and the United Church of Christ
and, and the Catholics and everybody else, it was much more diverse, religiously there.
George Tinker, O.C.
Gindi and what and Lutheran was my advisor at Iliff and he said, boy,
when you go off for your Lutheran year after your master's, you should really
go to the GTU in Berkeley, California, because they really have a connection
to all the denominations.
So that's what I did. And I ended up on the West Coast for a good number of
years, four or five years, and then had an internship in Hollywood, California,
made my way back east for my first call in in the Black Hills of Dakota.
And then Como Park Lutheran Church here in St.
Paul, and then eventually over here to Peace Lutheran. So this is my third call.
Yeah. What made you, how did you find yourself at Peace? What got you there?
Yeah, basically got a call from the bishop's office asking if I would consider
moving over from Como Park to here, which is, you know,
as, as you can, you can drive there in three minutes or less, it's so close.
And usually that's, that's not usually thought of as a good idea,
because you'll have, you know, parishioners that will follow a pastor to another
place if it's just down the street, and didn't really want that kind of a mess.
But you know, the bishop at the time, I just thought, I don't have any issue
with that, you the two churches are so vastly different.
One being very traditional and the other one being so small and almost like
a rural church in the middle of the city.
And besides that, it had very few members and the bishop's office more or less
thought, our days were numbered here.
So they leveled with me and said, you know, if you take that call,
basically it's hospice ministry and you'll be closing the ministry down after
70 years or so, because it's just got a handful of people left.
And that's what it'll be. So I basically came in with my eyes open to the interviews
and then found out really quickly that the people on the call committee,
they weren't looking at it as a time to shut the building down,
shut the ministry down. They were looking to find ways to radically.
Do something different in their neighborhood, but just didn't, didn't have the bodies.
So it's kind of a very traditional story in the mainline church now,
especially for inner city, well, even, you know,
more suburban and even country churches, you know, how do we get people back
back in the membership or back in the community of faith.
And so, you know, when it's been going downhill for so long,
as far as, you know, people being a part of it, it's pretty hard to turn it around.
So I think it was just being realistic on the part of the synod.
And we just had our second kid too.
So and that we just happened to live two blocks from this church in Lauderdale
itself, which is a little little city, little town with its own city hall and everything.
So I, I came in and realized really quickly that they really wanted to do something.
And I thought, well, that's kind of exciting without without a lot of illusions
of, you know, boy, this could be something, whatever, that could stay around,
you know, they had the ticker going, you know, at the current giving rate of
the current membership,
you know, we will be open for 18 months, and then it was, you know,
then we'll be open for 16 months.
And every every month, depending upon what what the offerings were.
We would adjust that. Okay, we've got enough money to exist for 11 more months.
And so it was kind of, and sometimes even published in the bulletin that way,
which becomes such a defeatist kind of a thing.
You've seen it in many places. In order to continue this ministry,
we need $1 million each week. Last week, we got $27.60.
This is how far off we are. And so basically people can just continue to stare
at the wreckage of a ministry that it can't sustain itself.
So that just really deflates people. So they were kind of there,
but at the same time, they were really wanting to be faithful to this place,
this neighborhood, and do something.
And so they wanted to hire me full time. And I would have, you know,
I'm more apt to say, yeah, I'll just, how about if I come halftime?
They wanted a full-time person in.
A ministry that wasn't taking any, anywhere near full-time, you know, needs.
My wife at the time is my greatest agent and advocate.
And she said, you can't take anything less than guidelines for full-time ministry
there, because we do have a second kid. and she was in school,
and the way she looked at it, and I think it's pretty right on.
If I were to take the call here, if they paid me guidelines.
You know, we would just close that much quicker a month earlier versus Six months,
you know later, you know, depending upon the money So what if we really want to be full-time?
Let's do this the right way and just uh, let's just have faith and move forward,
But we uh, and at the same time the people here, uh, you know the handful they were realistic too.
They they recognized that You know, uh as much as they desired to stay alive
it might not be in the cards, it might not be the best thing.
They may not have what the neighborhood needed at this moment and they were gonna be okay with that.
So the idea was, if I came here, we would do what we always wanted to do here.
As a people and we won't go out just wishing.
So one of the things that they wanted to do for years here, I came to find out,
was they always wanted to work on houses in the neighborhood for their neighbors,
and care for their neighbors.
And they even put it in place, they did a lot of work in developing a program,
a barter system program, where people would sign up with their gifts and they
would get points for their gifts.
So I'm always fond of saying, you know, if you were a brain surgeon here and
you said I could do brain surgery, you would get the equivalent of five points per hour.
But if you crocheted gloves, hats, and mittens, you know, it takes a lot longer to do that.
But it takes expertise to that only gets three points per hour.
So a brain surgeon gets five points per hour.
And so the idea is, you know, a plumber would get three points per hour or five points.
And then when you needed some work, let's say the person doing the gloves.
Would need on some plumbing work.
They could call the plumber and say, I've got six points saved up.
Could you come and work on my plumbing?
And that's the way it was designed to work, but it didn't work.
And I've come to understand it didn't work because people didn't really need each other.
People really don't need each other. For instance,
there was a person that's actually still here that would give you the shirt
off of her back and her husband's and lend you their car. They would do all kinds of things.
They would rack up so many points in helping people if they were allowed to
help people do whatever.
But they didn't wanna call anybody to come and do their windows,
their window washing because they didn't want to feel like, you know, they were using people.
So it's the, I think it's the number one issue we have as an, you know, as a culture.
I call it a credit card culture. You know, credit cards are really easy.
You offer up a credit card and you don't see the workers. You don't have to
know their names. You don't have to feed them.
You don't have to interact with them. You just pay the bill later and it'd be
better not to talk about the money at all, just send the bill.
And, but when it comes to, you know, it's, you know.
Jane is coming to wash your windows and everybody knows Jane is hypoglycemic.
So you better, everybody knows, okay, we'll take care of Jane when she comes.
And she's good on ladders, but you got to watch her, you know,
and she does a great job on windows. So that would be her gift.
Well, what would you do if you had a credit card and you had the means?
Would you hire a window cleaning company while you were gone on vacation?
Or would you get involved with Jane on the latter?
You know, so the relationships always take longer and you have to own the project together.
And if the windows don't get completely cleaned the proper way,
you only have Jane and yourself to blame instead of just pushing it off to some
other, again, the credit card separates us.
It becomes a wall between us and our neighbor.
So it failed. You know, they had all these over 100 people signed up with the
gifts that they could offer, but nobody was calling in ever to get help.
And, you know, it was a wonderful vision.
So when I got here, that's one of the things we had to work with is what do
they want to do? And when you mean they, you mean the congregation.
The congregation of 20 or less people, you know, you know, they,
you know, really, really wanted, wanted to live out this vision.
And but now it was becoming apparent that they were, they were very close to closing.
They could see they could see the end from where they were seated and and and
so what we agreed on was okay Let's have this vision.
Let's do this. Let's take the money. We've got left,
and put flyers out at every house in Lauderdale, 700 houses is about what we have.
And by foot, we walked around, delivered these flyers and just put them in the
doors. Don't bother anybody.
Don't knock on the doors. I mean, they've been practicing for months before I came in 2004.
They've been practicing about knocking on the doors of neighbors two by two,
because Jesus calls us to go out two by two.
And it would work like this, you know,
one person would go up to the door, the other person would stay on the curb,
and you'd go up with your little board and you'd knock on the door.
Somebody would finally come after you prayed for a whole minute that they wouldn't.
They finally opened their door and they say, can I help you?
And you say, yeah, we're from Peace Lutheran Church.
Do you have a couple minutes for three questions?
Because it's better to ask people questions and engage them than just say,
hey, would you come to church?
So the questions are, you know, what do you think the neighborhood need?
What could the church do more for the neighborhood?
And everybody always answered the same question. the question the same way,
it was always, we need something more for the children and we need to feel safer.
Well, those are like, who's gonna disagree with those? But so you end up with
the conversation ending in a pretty surface way.
And then you go down to the curb and then you go to the next house and you say,
you go up and get this one, cause I had the last one, I'll wait here for you.
And that's all there is to it.
And so I said, you know, if we if we put the flyers out, we're not talking to
anybody, unless you run into them, don't ring any bells, leave it alone. And they said, Why? Why?
I mean, that's against everything that that is out there in any literature about
going and meeting your neighbors.
I said, Yeah, I said, but let's think about it this way. And this is just for our neighborhood.
It could be true for other places, too. I found it's kind of true in a lot of
places, but at least where I've been, you know, let's, if I wasn't your pastor
called here, I live two blocks from here.
So let me guess, you want to go and meet these people right at suppertime,
because everybody will be there at suppertime.
So I said, I'm not your pastor, you ring my bell, it's suppertime,
I've got a, I've got a four year old and a two year old, I'm making dinner alone.
The bell rings, I look around the corner, and I see through the front window,
that it's somebody with a clipboard.
And I see somebody down below on the bottom of the steps, and I'm thinking Jehovah's Witnesses.
And I'm thinking, Oh, shoot, I'm in the there's a pot of water boiling.
And I've got a four year old that wants to climb up there and stir it.
What am I gonna so all right, since they already saw me before I duck back in
the kitchen, pretend like I'm not home.
I've got to go to the door. Now I open the door. Now we're starting a relationship
in a very precarious place.
I don't want to be answering the door. And they don't want me to answer the door.
So we're starting a relationship in a place where neither one of us really wants
to be there. And now we're going to go from there.
So I just said, forget it, unless you run into somebody, and you have a natural connection.
And you can you can have a conversation. Let it be.
So we did that. We put these flyers out and out of 700 flyers, we got three responses.
And which isn't a whole lot, you know, and one of them was a member.
So the flyers basically said, we'll come and we'll fix anything on your house.
From foundation to roof, plumbing, electric, anything you got wrong.
We'll bring all the materials and we'll bring the labor for free.
And at first they were worried about, you know, we've only got $40,000 left,
in this ministry if, if we, if we do this, we can, we could go through that
in one week with a house project.
And I said, yeah, that's true, but we're not going to get anybody to ask for
help. Number one, that's going to be a problem.
And I basically said, you know, if a church group that I didn't know about showed
up on my doorstep and said, we want to put a roof on your house for free.
I would chase them off my property. Get out of here. I don't know you and I
don't know what you're all what what are you doing?
And I mean, do you are you roofers? You know, all of that.
So we had three, we had three takers and one was a whole house that needed to
be painted. That was the member and or the soon to be member.
That's the only member we've ever gotten from this program. them.
And so we had two others.
One was a garage that was kind of falling into the ground, kind of rotting.
And another one was a roof project.
And so we had three of them. And the weekend that came,
you know, we we showed up, and we had about 20 members that came and a handful
of people from the neighborhood that I already knew and we made these little
sandwich boards that we called it Christmas in August and.
Partly because it's a it's kind of a neat name.
Nobody knows what it is and it it gives people
the natural first question like what is that and we
put the boards up in the front and neighbors would
come out and say what are you guys doing what's happening here because none
of us really look like construction workers and we're kind of a rag tag team
and we tell them what we're doing and they either help or they would they give
us a lot of accolades and by the time that first that first summer project was done.
We had more money than when we started because the neighbors were donating just
saying we're so glad you're doing this for Millie or you know,
thank you so much. You know, how can we help?
And, and at first I was a little frustrated because I thought,
you know, we're trying to, we're trying to,
we're trying to wear down this account so we can close, you know, and we didn't.
And we made it through that first year and people started paying attention and
we wrote a couple grants and we were awarded some money and we started picking
up members that heard about the program.
Them and then the next year we had five houses that responded and the next year there was seven.
It grew every year and and then as we went along, you know, like I say we got
one member from from all the people we've helped over the years,
you know, probably I don't know 200 200 houses.
We've been in we've only gotten one member, but we've gotten a ton of members
that wanted to come and join in on helping their neighbors.
So that's been that's been very sweet. We've learned a lot that way.
And now we've become a program where we do we do get together for one weekend a year.
And we usually work on between 15 and 25 houses, in all kinds of ways.
And, but we'll be a lot of cases in this neighborhood and we'll be the first
call for help for everything from.
Backed up sewers to leaky roofs to you know, I need help getting my car,
you know, started or um so just general things of life and then of course,
those people will call during the year as well when they have a loved one die or you know,
just a basic caring for each other kinds of things and loving your neighbor
and uh so we've got a very rich presence in the neighborhood and we still we worship,
you before the COVID thing happened,
you know, we would have physically in the building 50 people for worship.
You know, we went, we went in the first couple of years of doing this from the
fastest growing ELCA church in the country, because we were growing exponentially.
That's amazing. It's really easy to do when you've got two people,
you know, four people, is doubling your ministry. That's pretty good.
I remember at a pastor's meeting, I had a friend that came up and said,
Oh my gosh, did you see that your church was named as this exponential growth?
Where do you see it ending?
Are you going to keep growing like that? And I said, no, we're not going to keep growing like that.
We're going to hit the place where we've got some kind of a sustainable thing,
or we're going to hit some kind of an equilibrium.
And I think we're close to that, and I'm guessing that's where we'll be,
and we'll help each other.
But, you know, it's not a dream to keep growing exponentially, you know.
One question, I was reading the article about you from Living Lutheran.
And I think this was early on when you were interviewing with them,
because they would say that the congregation was dying.
You said it was dead.
And could you kind of explain what did that mean?
And of course, the congregation isn't closed, but you were already saying it was basically dead.
Yeah, yeah, you're you're hitting on a really big point.
You know, they wanted to see themselves when when, when I came in 2004,
as a congregation that was trying to redevelop itself, or it was trying to hang on.
And no matter what they tried, it really wasn't getting any traction.
And so we're a dying congregation.
And the first Sunday that I was there, or I was here for installation,
was the first Sunday installation service.
And we had about, I don't know, 150 or 200 people packed in this little sanctuary.
And I thought, man, they were selling me a bill of goods. They're doing great.
Until I started to realize looking out there that a lot of them were my wife's
family, extended family,
people from Como Park that came over to wish me well and send me on a new ministry.
And just a handful of people that I'd known.
And I thought, if you subtract all those, it probably will be a lot less.
Well, the next Sunday came, the Sunday after, and it was the raising of Lazarus.
And I remember looking out at the congregation and we had these pews set up
just like a regular sanctuary facing forward, 14 foot pews on each side with
a bowling alley down the middle.
And not even enough room on the side aisles to get a wheelchair up there. and about.
11 people in the sanctuary for worship. And of the 11 people,
five were seminary students that were con-ed program.
And to realize that, you know, the con-ed students were doing all the lessons,
they were serving communion, they were, you know, doing all these,
what came to be known as the professional religious parts.
And as I was looking out at these people, you know, they were uh sitting all
over the place and and they you know, they would smile but there was hardly any,
I just said, you know you guys really uh You pulled the wool over my eyes here.
I I said you guys told me that you were you were a dying church You're not dying.
You're dead This is dead and and they were a little shocked and I just said,
you know, it's uh you're done.
And I said, the good news is, you know, you're dead. The good news is you're dead.
The good news is you can resurrect something dead. You can't resurrect something almost dead.
It's kind of like this. It's like the, you know, the the movie.
I forget what it was called. It doesn't matter, but you know,
when you're always on the line and you're still operating under your own steam.
It's so easy to just be clutching at whatever you can grab in order to stay
from going under and keep bailing out the boat and it's like we don't belong in a boat.
The boat doesn't float just get in the water.
You know we're dead and to recognize that we've got nothing to lose.
We're dead already. You know $40000 in a bank account, it doesn't matter because we're dead.
A dead person has no use for that.
So let's let's take that good news.
And just take those resources and pay them forward.
And we'll celebrate the ministry with a potluck, we'll say goodbye,
and we'll go out on a good note, giving the money away, rather than trying to
do everything we could to keep floating.
And so, yeah, that was a key moment for us to recognize there's no guarantee for tomorrow.
And we have to just move into that recognition that, you know, we're already gone.
We're already, we're already pushing up daisies.
And it's okay. So good memory.
So, but how did do you think that that that moment?
I don't want to say turn things around, but made a difference in that the church
is still here, you know, almost 20 years later.
That was the death in some ways, a sense of letting things go,
and then kind of allowing what God was going to bring from this death.
Right, right. Yeah, we...
Well, let's uh, I'm an artist um potter and a painter and um,
And so i'm a visual i'm a very visual uh, uh person and uh, um I know one thing
I firmly believe and it's uh,
you you need to You need to have a holy imagination In order to keep existing
in a hopeless situation You have to imagine yourselves as blessed.
It's like, you know, blessed are those that mourn and not blessed are those
who are done mourning and are already having a good day.
It's blessed are those that mourn and it's in the act of mourning that we are
able to recognize that, you know, we're not waiting for tomorrow before the
blessing comes. We are blessed.
And blessed are those whose churches are hopeless.
For they will go on and do good things. They will go on and do powerful things.
So imagination is important.
And visually, I know that worship is a very visual, tactile thing.
I always call it a holy waste of time. I don't know if Gordon Lathrop said that
or not. but worship is a holy waste of time.
An hour, hour and a half, every week of our lives, we get nothing done.
We are useless as far as any production of anything.
And in so many ways, it's such a healing thing.
But we spend all this energy in choirs, making banners, you know,
making sure communion plates are clean, or that pyramids are all set up,
or new banners for the altar,
candlesticks are just, I mean, all of the unessential things that don't matter.
Are beautiful, and are in the right place. And so one thing I do know is we
get to do things that are so rote that you might have the most beautiful weaving
for a banner in the world.
And if you've had it up there for 25 years, you could walk past it and never
see it. So it needs to be changing.
You need to be creating, and you need to be actively doing that as a people.
I I believe that it's uh instead I think we've relegated the arts in uh communities of faith to Mrs.
Johnson and no offense to Mrs. Johnson bless her heart um but uh you know Mrs.
Johnson is known as the banner maker you know and um and whether that's good or not sometimes Mrs.
Johnson really got stuck on gluing shells to gunny sacks you know potato sacks
and doing block letters out of felt. There's nothing wrong with that.
But let's just let's give that let's give that proper time to be shown and move on.
The same is true with the most elaborate weavings. You know,
you can buy, you can buy altar impairments from companies for thousands of dollars a piece.
Well, who's going to move those on when you have this capital campaign to pay,
you know, tens of thousands of dollars for things that somebody else manufactured
and and you put up so it becomes more of a.
Feeding the idea of the holy professional religion
you know if you order it through such
and such company then it must be a holy professional thing rather than you know
let the kids make it you know and you might be surprised so I think visually
we started to work with the sanctuary and do art shows and we cut up the pews.
We started cutting the pews up because we only had a handful of people.
Why not sit in a circle and believe God is in our midst or do we believe God
is projected up on one end of the building?
You know, should we look at each other when we speak and sing?
Should we how should we develop you who we are, and make our setting reflect what we believe.
And so that, I had to become a cheerleader for some awful projects, awful, awful, awful.
Like we pulled the carpet out after we cut the pews up and the floor was so ugly.
It was all asbestos tile from the 50s, you know, brown and light brown and dark and just horrible.
And we couldn't afford to cover them, but we did.
We just, we, we primer painted over the top of those things.
And then we invited people to bring house paint.
And we were going to teach each other how to marbleize the floor so it would look like marble,
and uh golly it was horrible horrible and
uh but then we put glazes over the top we've got another artist here who knows
how to do glazing techniques over the top and tied it all together beautifully
and then we installed a labyrinth um on the floor so um we've got this nice
circle so we focus ourselves and you know around that labyrinth.
So it becomes a different focal point, but it talks about the journey,
you know, and we're all on a journey.
We don't know where we're going or how we're going to get there. But we we do it together.
And so we started reflecting visually what we were what we were trying to live out.
And so all of a sudden, I put the seminary students that were wonderful.
I've had so many wonderful seminary students back when that program was really working.
I'll put them on notice, you know, if you really need to practice reading the
lessons, you can let me know.
But if you're pretty good at reading the lessons, forget it. We don't need you.
We're going to give a lesson reading to the people.
And if people are not good at reading and they want, that's okay.
We'll go slow. We'll listen. We'll, we'll let them correct themselves.
So we started doing very unprofessional worship services, you know,
people collecting offerings that, you know, couldn't remember if they'd gone
up that aisle or not, or gone over to that side of the circle.
And kids were involved in, you know, communion serving and very, very.
You know, on the ground, you know, very rooted in this community.
And so if seminary students needed to preach, that's great.
In fact, that was that was super as far as I was concerned. I need a break every
once in a while, but we don't need them.
We don't need them to do all of the professional church stuff.
That's the work of the people and let's empower the people and lo and behold,
what do you find out? but the people that weren't the best at those jobs are
stars, you know, they are the stars.
And that, I mean, that's the gospel right there.
And so the seminary students really enjoyed that.
Some did, some didn't, that, you know, they really wanted a lot of experience doing all the stuff.
And so, but that era changed and ended.
And we still had students around, and that was beautiful.
But I feel like we gave the ministry back to the people that were here.
And as people came, we really believed that they should change us.
Every person that comes through that door should change us in some way,
shape or form, because we are a reflection together.
And if they're just fitting into what we're doing, and if you like us,
you like us. If you don't, go somewhere else. you know.
So we've shifted over the years and we've changed and we continue to do that.
But yeah, they were dead and and and resurrection keeps coming to us over and
over again and and that's that's been it's been rich.
Yeah I guess that's kind of and you've probably already answered this question
is kind of where have you seen resurrection happening?
It seems like that's been happening and having the people kind of taking over
some of the parts of the service that for so long they didn't have a role in. Right, right.
Yeah, as in a lot of churches, you know, we, I said early on,
it's like, you know, people say, you know, the sign of a growing church is that
there are children around, you know, there are little kids around, where are the kids?
And at first, we only had a handful of kids, you know, we had two of them that
we brought, you know, and it's like, you know, I said, well,
there are children in each one of us, we each have an inner child.
So I want all of us, including 97 year old, you know,
Alice Matthews, all of us are on our knees, painting the sanctuary floor,
we're giving it our best shot, and, and having fun with it and laughing at our
mistakes. And we're going to be kids.
And, and, you know, the the grieving that takes place,
you know, we don't have enough kids to do a Christmas program,
you know that kind of a thing and it's like well, we're still gonna have a Christmas
program Let's we're gonna come and everybody just grab an outfit when you come
in the door and it's a no rehearsal Christmas program,
and we'll call people up as the parts are,
told and we'll have a narrator and Just just to give you a little taste of this.
You know, we had a little girl that came she's about 10 years old now and when
she was to her birthday, she went in for a well check, and they found she had, she had kidney cancer.
And she needed to get a kidney removed and then have chemo and radiation.
And as a two year old, and so we walked with that family for,
you know, a couple years of treatment and trying to get through cancer.
Well, when she was about four, two years later, the Christmas program came around
and here she is, she's, she's bald, except for the furry little hair on the
top of her chemo-ridden head, and she's got steroids in her,
and she's got...
Uh necropathy in her in her feet, so she doesn't her feet don't work perfectly
and Anyway, she wants to be an angel for the christmas pageant that year and
uh, and she comes in And I tell you what so disruptive.
I mean Yelling and laughing and she can't sit still In this angel outfit.
So there are a bunch of angel outfits running around and this kid is running
from one end of the church sanctuary to the other and squealing.
And there's not a dry eye in the place because who's to say that angel they're
supposed to be well behaved or sit still or, you know, be angelic, whatever angelic is.
We just were so gleefully thankful that she was alive and And we were so happy
that in her steroid induced.
You know, hyperactivity, she was flying as an angel from end to end.
And she really set us straight, you know, because you still have people that,
you know, we want the kids to behave, you know, and it's like,
she really changed us. She changed us in her illness.
And and she's changed us through this pandemic to as a 10 year old.
You know, she's very compromised if she gets it.
She's in big trouble so there's there's very few, you know, uh,
um, I don't use anybody here that would Not wear a mask or do what they could to protect that,
that kid And it's because uh, they know the angel that she is and she's she's
she's got a little demon underneath that costume,
but we love that little demon and,
uh, um So yeah, our pageants are gonna be a little chaotic.
I mean, okay, they're gonna be very chaotic But that's the way our life is too
and somewhere holiness comes through in that and it's changed us.
Yeah, so that's resurrection right there, you know to do a Christmas pageant
every nobody comes to me anymore and says I'm so nervous and worried.
Nobody's helping me put the Christmas pageant together The kids are in 10 months
of practices, and I'm sick of it. I'm not doing it anymore.
It's like, nobody worries about it.
Nobody, nobody, and it's beautiful. So it's a gift, it's a real gift.
And where did, you kind of said that the member, the new members that were coming
were hearing about this.
Were they hearing about it just through?
Other people or how did you know how did the word get spread that what would peaceful doing?
Yeah, pretty much word of mouth. Okay, I was neighbors talking to neighbors
and neighbors talking to a family member that came to visit.
And so we'll, you know, we're still a largely a neighborhood church.
And, you know, yeah, it just spreads that way.
And sometimes people will come like we had a City Pages article that was done
a few years ago. Mm-hmm, I remember that.
It was very sweet and we had so many visitors showing up,
thinking that we were the promised land or something and then what they came
to find out was here's this kid, you know, running around and here's a choir
that sometimes doesn't sing on key,
you know, and this person here keeps dropping their coffee cup And it's,
okay, how can we help, you know?
And it's like, well, grab a cup of coffee and meet a few people and live your
life. You know, helping will come.
Don't worry about that part. But no, where do we sign up and who organizes this?
And it's like, well, you know, if you want to come on Tuesday,
I'm going to be working on someone's toilet. You know, I work on Tuesday, you know?
So it becomes this, how can I plug in to a regimented thing?
And give my gift at the prescribed time or and there's nothing wrong with that.
I totally respect that but the magic that if there is any magic,
it comes from people sharing their lives together.
So we had a number of people come through and then go back out.
Because it's better to be able to give than to just live your life with people.
But we've gotten a lot of support from the neighbors and from in the greater
cities area and across the country through that particular article.
So it's really been affirming.
Yeah, it's been it's been very, very wonderful. We you know,
we had we had a member in the neighborhood that I almost gave the name but it's
an anonymous member that died and they left $220,000.
To this little church back in 2010 and,
I remember telling the Synod that we were we were going to give we're going
to tithe it but we were going to find all these places that we're going to tithe
to, and we're going to engage ourselves in how to spend that money for the good of the world.
And we firmly believe in what the Senate is doing. I think it's an amazing Senate.
And but our people never really understood about connecting money as a tool to what we do.
So we were going to do that. I remember when the bishop's assistant said, I heard about your gift.
I'm so sorry to hear that.
And I said, so sorry to hear that. He said, yeah, and I understand what he's saying here.
He said, little churches like you guys, if you've given a big gift like that,
usually that it ends up creating so many fights and animosity and,
and, and disagreements about how to spend that money,
that ends up tearing people apart.
And we certainly could have gone that way, but we decided to spread it out into
three buckets, basically, infrastructure of our building, would be X number of dollars.
Give it to the neighborhood, invest in the neighborhood somehow would be another third.
And then another third would be programs and opportunities for people with education and whatnot.
And helping. And so one of the things we did was, oh, and the other thing is
everything we do with that money, that gift will only give 50% of what's needed for that project.
So the first thing people wanted to do is, let's get an elevator,
you know, cause we couldn't afford an elevator 20 years prior.
It was 200 and some thousand dollars. And so we ended up digging the elevator
ourselves, got shovels, we dug the elevator out ourselves, we built it ourselves.
We had a company come and put the guts in. And the whole project ended up being
like $25,000 total for the whole thing, start to finish.
And it took us about a year and a half to do it together.
And then we put solar panels on the roof and all of our utilities are paid for now.
And then we make five, $6,000 a year off the solar panels.
And uh and that keeps being regenerated into the fund.
Um so uh they even got creative with that money. You know, how do we use this
as a tool? How do we give it away?
We bought a grand piano. Not brand new but enough so that the neighbors could
come and use it for recitals and and whatnot.
And um yeah so resurrection happens in ways but um uh one of the things that
I remember hearing from one of
the committee members back when we got that money was they kept asking me,
is there anything we could do with this money that would cause you to say I'm
done, I think I need to move on to another church.
And I kept saying, you know, as long as we all agree together in community,
what to do with this, and we all have a voice.
That's a consensus, I can live with that. And they kept asking me and kept asking me.
And then finally, I I said, you know, if we use this money as a credit card.
If we just take this money and use it to avoid needing our neighbors to help, then I think I'm done.
If we use it as a credit card to pay a company to come and put an elevator in
and we can stand back and complain about how long they're taking or what the
overages are in payments, we need to have some skin in the game and we need to do this together.
And there's nothing wrong with doing it, you know, the way uh a good portion
of society does and just use the money.
We didn't make the piano. We didn't come together and say, we'll put $10,000,
for it and then we'll make the rest of the piano.
There's some things we can't do but there are some things we can,
you know, we can, you know, we can make the dolly for it. We've got a steel worker.
You make the dolly for us. And by engaging people with the gifts they have.
And one of the other things was,
you know, we're always on the ropes with money, we are this year, too.
We always said that you can only use up to 10% of that gift towards the operating budget.
And it's been, how long has it been 11 years since we got the gift,
and we've never used a nickel of it for the operating budget, not one nickel.
And, but we've used that money to do a lot of good stuff.
So that's been very, it's been and you know, we're, you know,
we're totally, you know, we, we, we create almost tripled the energy of this building that we use.
So we, in a sense, it's kind of strange 1954 building all concrete blocks with no insulation.
And we would qualify as a lead building. Wow.
Amazing. Because we're generating more more energy than we're consuming.
It's beautiful. And if we can do it, if we can do it, you know,
there's so many things that can be done.
So so what would you say?
Because there are lots of congregations
like peace that are out there that are probably of that size.
They you know, don't have a huge amount of money in the budget.
Um, how what advice would you give them for where they are and what they can do?
And I'm not saying necessarily to turn themselves around, but to basically to
live or to be resurrected to allow themselves to be resurrected. Let's put it that way.
Yeah, I think I'd begin with I'd begin with just finding out where do they have joy?
Where does their joy stem from?
Quit focusing on the scene of the accident.
Quit looking at the cars that they've driven. and quit looking at who they've
been in the past, stop all that
and start asking serious questions about where do they find their joy?
Where do they see resurrection happening already?
And uh and you know where are they curious you know what's their curiosity and
and I'm talking about just in their regular lives not not in not in uh their church life but,
where do they find uh their passion and um and go from there like a church I
had in the hill in the in the uh Black Hills of South Dakota.
You know, I did a few things with people around working on homes for neighbors
that were in need out there. It didn't really work.
It just it didn't fit that that place and but we did we helped a few people,
you know, they have a whole different.
They have a whole different ethos going on in the hills.
They did it in other ways, through the arts and, you know, community garden and,
but you know, they don't do it, don't don't find something to do that can raise your money. Don't.
It's like, we really look back on the ministry that we've done,
you know, we've gotten very little money from Christmas in August. You know, It's cost us.
But we've just come to enjoy it so much and to love our neighbors through it.
And it made a huge difference because it tapped into our passion.
We're always being scrappy about how can we make the budget?
We're always doing that.
Maybe we could write this grant or that grant, or maybe we could put together,
you know, and every year is different. Like one year we,
one year we I had a number of elderly people that were getting dementia and
they were sitting home alone or with a partner that just never got a break.
And I said to myself, you know, maybe we should write a grant and create some
kind of like a day program for some of our people, you know,
or maybe deliver them to the community center.
And then somebody asked if we would be interested in putting an addition on
their house as a kitchen.
Right down the street. And next thing you know, I said, well,
until I write that grant, maybe we'll do that with them.
So we went down the street and every day at lunch, every day,
you know, the person that, that wanted this kitchen on their house was a volunteer of ours.
She'd feed everybody that came.
So she had people that, you know, were forgetful and couldn't swing a hammer,
you know, so it was kind of like, I called it the Misfit Construction Company.
And for over a year, everybody met there every day.
And a lot of days I couldn't be there, but they'd still be there.
They'd be sweeping up or sanding a little board that didn't need sanding or needed sanding.
And then that family took care of all those people and got us through.
So we were given donations from that family for an addition.
And that made our budget that year, it was amazing.
And, but we created a day program for people in need by doing it.
And it was creative and it's like, is that sustaining?
No, we're not doing that anymore. We don't have the ability to do it now,
but who knows what's coming tomorrow?
So how did the church fare during COVID since a lot of people this time, Well, last year,
most of the year, people weren't in churches and had to do things via YouTube
or Facebook and all that.
How did the church fare during that time period?
Yeah, you know, we applied for the PPP loan. You know, and that really helped get about $20,000.
Through the government that that was, it's like a fifth of our budget.
And that really helped us.
But we were also, you know, that first year, you know, the Synod, St.
Paul area Synod, you know, called and gave us 2000 bucks towards our bills and
said, you know, I think we're doing really well.
You know, we've got this PPP thing, you know, give it to somebody that needs
it. And they were very sweet.
And I remember Patricia Lowell said, no, we want you to have it.
It's from the it's from the ELCA, you know, national and for churches like yours,
do something with it. That'll help some people.
So, we ended up getting ended up getting $100 gift cards to all these.
To give out to people that needed it. And so we had 20 of them at first two
thousand dollars worth And we gave them to our people and said if you know somebody
that's in need Of groceries or help give them this card and the trick is this.
Give it to them And tell them that if they could use it, they should use it
If they can't use it then give it to somebody that they think could use it pass it on and then nobody,
nobody felt like they were uh receiving something they shouldn't or they weren't ashamed of it.
They became a link in the chain for help
down the line and uh um so it works so well and the thing was people could come
to the church and get four or five of these cards if they knew people and so
we were giving our own members these cards And it was so amazing that people
were able to come here and do that.
And so we got another $2,000 of our money and then another $2,000 of our money.
So I forget, we've given six or $7,000 worth of those cards out since COVID
began on top of our, you know, pledging to the Synod and whatnot.
And it's been beautiful because it's not a program we all vote on and then that's it.
You just hear uh uh you know some kind of uh a report on where the money went.
It's literally physical people handing help to somebody else and reaching out
to neighbors and it it happens to all of our members and um so we still we've
got about four of them left but uh we're probably gonna have to get more pretty
soon but that was wonderful.
Um the other thing is we we do share our sanctuary. We rent out the afternoon
on Sundays to a Mennonite congregation called Emmanuel.
And they have not met in the building since COVID started.
But they still send us $1,300 a month and.
We told them right away and they're they're they're
they're probably about the same size we are but um
they they've been committed we said stop paying rent until you come back you
know we know how hard it is and they said well we know how hard it is to keep
a building you know and so they keep paying us every month even though they're
not in the building and that's that's just been such a sweet um relationship
and we look forward to them coming back.
But our budget hurts more this year than it did last year.
But we still meet on zoom live.
And we're doing a hybrid together live and in person right now,
like most people, but we stay masked.
And, and people need each other. So it we haven't.
We've learned new things about ourselves and done some good things on zoom that
we wouldn't have done otherwise. So it's been good.
What are those things that you've learned on zoom? Oh, I'm different. Boy.
I've really enjoyed it. And I I've said this, and our people would say the same thing.
They've really enjoyed zoom worship, trying to figure out what that is.
And part of it is when you're in person like we are now we're half in person
half on Zoom and we project it and people interact with each other.
But when you're in person, there's all this body language going on.
There's a breeze that comes in and makes everybody kinda you know shudder a
little bit and then they look at each other in the eyes across the room and
for a moment, their concentration is gone and they are wondering who opened the door.
They're wondering, you know, and then somebody drops something and then they
look over and somebody's laughing.
So there's all of this interaction that's going on that's unspoken in the room when it's live.
And there's not a level of concentration. Like right now, I see you.
You know, we always joke about on Zoom, were they wearing pants or not? You know, who cares?
It doesn't matter. But it's like in you worry about all that stuff in person,
but on zoom, I'm looking at your bright smiling face and And you got a painting
on your wall and that is it.
So I'm interacting with you and as a congregation of 50 people.
Everybody is muted, except for a speaker. Everybody's focusing on that.
They might drop their coffee cup, but nobody hears it.
The dog might come in, nobody hears it. And if somebody wants to speak on Zoom
worship, they have to physically unmute, and people listen to them.
And people that never spoke before speak on Zoom, because they've got equal
access, equal opportunity, and they know people will be listening.
And so it's really been an equalizer that way for those that will do Zoom.
But some people want nothing to do with it. And we don't have very many people
like that, but we've tried to help them get computers if they need it.
But yeah, it's, you know, after church is done, people clear out and they're gone.
And oftentimes Zoom breakout rooms we'll go for another hour, hour and a half.
It's like, because they are, they have this undivided attention and that's not
something we have anymore in churches or otherwise, you don't have it. So.
Where do you see the future of the congregation?
I don't know, we have to catch up to it.
I don't know. I don't know. You know, I've been here for 20 years now.
20 years. It'll be 20 years, 18 years, 18 years.
Feels like just started but
and it feels like you know 20 years but it's it's changing all the time and
I was worried for a long time about because I really I believe this congregation
is doing amazing things for this neighborhood. It's really a needed thing.
You know, sharing the body of Christ as the body of Christ in this place at
this time is, it's been so powerful.
And so I started thinking about, you know, wanting to be a good steward of this,
of this gift to the neighborhood.
How can we set it up to be self-sustaining into the years to come long after Dave Greenland.
And I've had plenty of people that have said, don't worry about that. Don't worry.
You know, just keep trying to catch up to the future now.
Forget about the safety of, you know, guaranteeing this or that,
you know, it's kind of like, can we endow a position, you know?
And it's like, no, I think churches really need to Be hungry.
We need to be hungry and always alert about how to be bodies of Christ risen in this time and place.
The future is somewhere on the road to Emmaus, you know, it's up there somewhere.
And right now I know that
we are doing our best to figure out how to keep this little girl safe from a
virus and how to continue to connect with people that are really scared and alone and restless.
That's our future right now.
And how do we remain hopeful in a world that just seems to be hell bent on self-sufficiency.
And doing their own safety measures of insurance and how to save this democracy.
It's not a bad thing to worry about, but it's not something that this church
will survive and be the body of Christ whether this democracy survives or not.
And I have to keep telling myself that because I worry about it all the time.
How do we repair the caste system we have in this country of racism?
This church will continue to be the body of Christ.
Wherever we end up on that and how do we present ourselves? There's a lot to be hopeless about.
But there's so much that we need to die to in order to be the future.
And part of some of the worrying is it needs to die.
And I say that, I don't say that lightly because I'm worried about a lot of things right now.
And I just have to remind that, you know, is that little, is that little,
you know, demon angel goes running to the sanctuary, you know,
in my mind's eye, or I see her out on the street, down the street,
you know, running with her super boots,
you know, with her feet that don't work.
And I remember, okay, we're the body of Christ, you know, we're not this or
that. So, yeah, future? That ain't mine.
I think one thing that's been an interesting theme here is you talk a lot about self-sufficiency.
And it seems like one of the things that...
It seems to have helped this congregation is to be vulnerable.
I am I correct in that assessment or it just seems like that's what I've been picking up.
Yeah, no, that's yeah, that's absolutely right.
We can't do it alone, you know, but that doesn't mean you don't start,
you know, you don't, you don't. When we started the elevator project,
Looking back on that, it's one of the craziest things I ever did.
Crazy. Because I told people to bring their shovels with them to church.
We started digging a hole that was going to go 15 feet into the ground.
I can't even remember how many tons of dirt that is,
but you know, you put your shovel in the ground and then you put the dirt where
it can't stay there because it's a big hole.
And not thinking that through, you know? And if you think through every problem
that you're gonna have, you'd never start.
And we had bigger projects than that, you know?
You keep you keep showing up and uh not
with all the materials you need and just trusting that something
will happen but you know um one
example of that would be this so we were going to put solar panels on the roof
and before we put solar panels on the roof a hailstorm hit the roof which was
from god the hailstorm from god hit the roof and gave us an insurance payout
to put a new roof on this church,
which we needed before we could put solar panels on.
So they're putting this new roof on and they realize they need insulation up there.
And so they're putting insulation up there and then they put the shingles on.
And as a result, they've got insulation on the roof for the first time ever.
And what happens is the roof is not going to melt the snow off anymore.
So we created a problem. Now we've got this insulated roof that'll be more energy
efficient, but now we're going to have this incredible load of weight on the
roof that never was there.
And the engineer for the solar panel said that the roof was going to collapse
this winter in the first couple snows.
And we said, that can't be true. This has been here for all these years.
We got our own engineer who confirmed that and said, if you don't,
if you don't get the snow off that roof immediately, when it comes down,
and the building's gonna collapse.
So we had people showing up every time it snowed more than an inch with roof
rakes pulling the snow off.
And then we had to come up with a plan to reinforce the roof with 12,000 pounds
of steel and do it ourselves. Otherwise it was gonna cost $100,000.
So we bought the steel, we had it delivered, we had to unload it.
And then we had to figure out how to equip 13,000 pounds of steel.
On the ceiling to keep the roof from collapsing. I don't know how to do that.
And I still didn't know even after we put the stuff on the floor in the church.
But people started coming up and showing up and saying I think we could do it
this way or that way and and I mean, it's just stupid the things that we did and very vulnerable.
And you know, one thing we could have done is it wouldn't have been as vulnerable
to just pick the right construction company and then just have cottage meetings
to try to figure out how to raise $100,000,
to save the roof.
That's not vulnerable. That's that's.
Not sure what it is, but it keeps us from being vulnerable and we've gotten
far from that. So yeah, that's a great point.
You know it's about vulnerability and you got and not worrying about looking like a fool.
It's look really foolish here. We really do.
Well, but I think that also goes back to Christ as well.
I mean, that there is a talk about kind of grace being foolish.
And yeah, Paul talks about that. So it's, it's pretty biblical.
Act foolish. Yeah, we for, you know, in some ways, it's kind of like where we
started this conversation, it's
kind of like we didn't have any kids that would show us that we had life.
But we all have an inner kid.
And to see a 97 year old lady with arthritic knees on the floor,
giggling in a sanctuary as she painted with house paint.
Is priceless. And it's so childlike and childish and full of life.
Her giggles are full of life.
And we don't have enough of that. But it comes out of a vulnerability.
Yeah, yeah, you're right. Well, thank you for this interview.
This was, I think, a very helpful, engaging and to tell the story of one church,
I'm hoping that it can make a difference to other people who are listening.
You know, it's not necessarily, you do this and this will happen,
but I think it's helpful to hear those stories, to give communities of faith to think about that.
Yeah, I pray that people that hear
this will just start learning how to
continue opening their eyes the way they
have been but open your eyes and just keep
looking and keep watching and listening and being foolish
and you know follow the laughter follow the smiles and then follow the food
follow the food together and laugh it'll happen yeah and that food might be
a potluck saying goodbye to a ministry,
that's okay too. There might be something else coming.
So yeah, thank you so much. Thanks for the great questions.
And I'm glad that there are people out there that are doing the same things in different ways.
And it feels good to not be alone. Yes, it does. Yeah.
All right. You be well. All right. Thank you so much. Take care. All right.
Music.