I’ll begin by saying of course the pandemic has been horrible. It continues to be, with new variants out to kill us, and people believing the pandemic is over. We are still in a crisis, folks, and the people in your congregations trying to keep you alive are exhausted by the people in your congregations refusing to let them keep masking, distancing, and other safety policies in place.
But this is not what I want to talk about. What I want to talk about is how the long time of physical spaces being shuttered and some of the work of our congregations being on hold created a chance to do some important groundwork. Boring, but important.
I’m talking about building and systems maintenance and repair.
Yes, it’s infrastructure week here at Hold My Chalice.
Some congregations – but not enough of them – took the time to do upgrades, repairs, and evaluations of systems. I know one who built the accessible bathrooms they’d been talking about. I know another that did major work on their electrical system. And a third that systematically reviewed their policies and processes.
But that’s… not that many.
Many leaders laid fallow while a small few exhausted themselves producing online worship each week. The policy reviews and bylaw changes seemed too boring and unnecessary. And then as folks came back into the physical building, everyone looked around and said “hello, old friend” and that was it.
But two years of neglect has an effect.
Your tech and worship people are STILL exhausting themselves now, producing multi-platform worship each week. Old policies and bylaws don’t work, communication and financial processes are outdated, but whatever, we’re agile and we’ll just work around them. The plumbing that was dicey then is even more dicey now because of lack of use. There are signs of aging in the walls and floors. No one is dealing with the stuff that was left in situ when we suddenly shuttered our doors, so there are messes and overstuffed closets hiding said mess. And holy moly, the place is filthy.
But sure. Come back into the building, declare the pandemic over, and start new initiatives. Come up with new things to occupy your time. Forget the old, this is the New!
Um… is that an albatross I see around your neck?
Yeah.
Oops.
You still have a lot of the old, and it needs tending, because too much has slipped in the time of lockdown and online worship. That’s a hell of a thing to still be carrying around.
I was part of a board retreat last summer where I told the members serving on the board that this had to be an infrastructure year, that their focus needed to be on repair, review, and renewal. They didn’t like that as their strategic goal, because they wanted to do something new – they wanted to concentrate on outreach.
To bring new people into a broken, dirty building with communications and other systems not working properly.
Sigh.
As this Substack’s banner says, I have opinions.
We have a lot of work to do, and we could have done a lot of it – probably not in 2020 (because we were still figuring out what the hell was happening), but certainly starting in 2021 and into 2022.
Remember how many news stories there were about the crumbling infrastructure in the US, and how we gasped at the lack of attention by the former administration, which turned the phrase “infrastructure week” into a joke? And how relieved we were when President Biden signed the Infrastructure Law, finally, in November 2021?
Imagine if you put that passion into your congregation’s infrastructure – how beautiful and aligned with our values the place will be, and how smooth and modernized and aligned with our values the processes will be.
Maybe then you can focus on outreach with confidence that people will not just want to visit, they might want to stay.