Flowers in the Ruin

There’s a huge old church building. It might seem to be dying. Up and down the hallways of the massive, mansion-like edifice, weekends used to teem with Sunday school as young marrieds entered a Father-Knows-Best 1950s. Children filled the lower hallway with laughter and budding enthusiasm. Teens met and came of age during the era of Woodstock, human rights and sexual revolution. Some of them got married and had kids. Others left the church. Singing and exhortation from the sanctuary flowed into the streets, growing a bit less noticeable as the years went by, and the Methodist vibrancy faded with the paint on the walls.

Today a different kind of vibrant is happening. It would go unnoticed in the neighborhood and to those picking up trash for an emerging missional church movement like AAC. But walk the halls on a Sunday morning and you will find people from several congregations, so many ethnic groups you need a world map to plot them out. If it doesn’t seem as though there are many cars outside it is because the Haitians did not move from their little Caribbean island with automobiles in tow. They pile into one car or hitch rides from what few Caucasions remain from the United Methodist glory days. And the singular, thundering pulpit of the big room has given way to many smaller groups meeting throughout the weekend, some in the sanctuary, some in the chapel, some in their hundred-square-foot offices, some in the dark basement at the end of a long stairway downstairs.

All this quiet vibrancy is underscored by an immaterial lack of concern for all the things suburban church-goers have come to demand. The dusty bookshelves contain all the best publishing from the 70s (James Dobson with dark hair – and sideburns!). Expansive foyers and hallways are mini storage units for an abundance of pianos, chairs, folding tables, dated Jesus artwork, boxes, broken credenzas and even a few oddities such as a graphotype addressograph used as a makeshift music stand in an upstairs hallway leading to a fire exit. In other words, you won’t find much to attract the broad Evangelical center, and you will find much to deter it.

As I have chronicled, church buildings such as these were vacated by the upwardly mobile over the past half of the century during a suburban flight that has seen the boom of big-box, Costco-esque church structures sprouting all over the new shopping malls and business districts. For new-church goers, the chairs are plush and the video screens are monstrous. From the suburban metric there, city churches have very little to offer the relatively pampered, college-bound kids and her professional parents.

A few of us are rebelling from the insulated Christianity while the masses are living without church altogether. Some Jesus followers are returning to the city for renewal or to help reverse the trend of urban abandonment. We knew that some of the urban churches have thrived as trendy city spots for those whose preference is more eclectic or traditional. And it was easy to see that other buildings have simply been boarded up or torn down; or they house a decaying congregation that waits for Jesus, or the glory days, to return.

Not so noticeable is a place like this. And I need forgiveness. So relenting is my call for reformation, so tired is my being from all the selfish and inward-looking churchianity, wasted resources, false gospel – a general failure of the church to live out the call of Jesus to proclaim good news to the poor, heal the sick, talk to the lonely – that the church building itself becomes an image of the worldly kingdom. Forgive me. At least here it is not. It is a symbol of the kingdom of God flowering up from the ruin.

While most whites have left this old church building, a few have stayed and pressed on. Somehow they have resisted the urge to remain set on a 1950s course, resisted the desire to merely board it up and sell it and move to suburbia, or worse yet sing the same old apocalyptic songs – louder and louder – while praying for the Second Coming and ignoring the world outside. Somehow they have had the wherewithal to see a different vision altogether.

They have said, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened.” They have welcomed in all comers. I walk around here and listen to the beautifully broken English of the 21st Century immigrants. I meet various other domestic-urban missionaries with their ministries to teen-age graffiti convicts and prostitutes. I curl over in humility and brokenness and realize that I too have been taken in at last, after hundreds of conversations with various church planters and leaders who might have written a check to fund various pre-cooked Adams Avenue Crossing dreams. I have been given a little office with 20-year old shag carpeting and a big florescent light in the center of the ceiling, and a 30 year old cranked window that does not really open on either side, and venetian blinds that haven’t been washed since being hastily installed a long time ago. There is an old blackboard installed into the wall. And the nicest office manager you will ever meet. And a bunch of people from all over the world with little offices up and down the hallway where the Sunday school classes used to meet. That day has come and gone. Today is ours.

I am still set on a missional compass. The call of Adams Avenue Crossing is the call of the apostle, being sent out where the people are. But I needed a place to store my books, and spend quiet moments. And these people are … out. They are the disenfranchised. And the Crossing is about the place where people come together. Besides, as it is written, “When you enter a town and are welcomed, eat what is set before you.”

My soul yearns for connection and unity. The whole Adams thing was born out of the desire to have suburbanites cross into the urban world in service. Following Jesus. I dream of empowering outsiders to come in with their paint and work clothes and give this place some TLC, new windows, restore the old hardwood floors, hang up a few plasmas in the sanctuary. And that might be great. But maybe I should just stop and be one of the meek. And enjoy what we have. And maybe pick up the hymnal and read the words like the Haitians do, just happy to be here. And walk down to the sprawling old kitchen where people of all colors eat donuts and bread and drink cheap coffee with cream and sugar. And listen to their stories.