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There's No Place Like Home by Alan & Karen Selig |
In 2004 our church was blessed with a Lilly Endowment sabbatical grant given for the purpose of clergy renewal. For three months, we were able to step back from the day to day responsibilities of pastoral ministry and take time to play and pray. After 12 years as co-pastors of the same congregation, we were ready for personal re-charging. We also valued the time to read and reflect on ways to move ahead in an intentional church transformation process that had begun in our congregation in 1998. What we learned about congregational transformation is a story for another day. This article is about an extreme home makeover!
In the course of the sabbatical, we had a variety of temporary homes. In addition to spending a number of nights in various bed and breakfasts, we enjoyed time in a tiny one-room cottage in Rhode Island and a stay on a working sheep farm. We shared a camping cabin with mice, hibernated in a lovely apartment over a library in Green Lake, Wisconsin, and watched for whales from the deck of a house overlooking a bay in the Pacific Northwest. We ended our sabbatical in the spacious home of family friends in Klamath Falls, Oregon and returned to the house in Manhattan, Kansas, where we had lived for a dozen years.
That house had been a great place for us to raise two daughters. It’s only a few blocks from the high school and it has a large family room and an expansive backyard for Jenny and Cali and their friends to come together. But with both our daughters gone, it was more house and yard than we needed. We were happy in that house; it provided a lovely refuge from the real world. It was in a quiet, stable neighborhood with no sidewalks for pedestrian traffic and very little interaction with other neighbors…a nice place for pastors to retreat from the busy-ness of ministry. But God had other ideas.
It took many nights of God waking Karen up at 4 AM for prayer and journaling sessions before we began to seriously consider that God might be asking us to make a change in our housing situation. We longed for our church to become truly missional people who discerned where God was at work in the world and joined in. But it began to be clear that God was calling us to move out of our comfortable refuge and become more missional ourselves. We had to make a fresh start personally if we were to be authentic leaders for our transforming congregation. We invited a realtor in our church into the process. We told her we wanted a smaller house in an area where we could share the love of God with our community in tangible ways. She pointed out that there were two highly-transitional population groups in our community – military families and college students. We decided that with our gifts and life experiences (even though we were both over 50 years old) we ought to look for a place in one of the neighborhoods in our community where college students abound.
The house we found was not the ideal home. From the outside it looked like an abandoned building—the paint was peeling off all three stories of the 75 year old house. Brick facing had fallen off and the yard was overgrown with weeds. It needed all new siding. We had to call in a plumber twice in the first week we owned it. Yet in another sense it was ideal -- it had a large front porch and a big living room for entertaining. The inside had been recently renovated, with new wiring, lighting, windows and doors. The sidewalk running by the front yard was used daily by neighbors walking dogs and students heading to classes. Best of all, the house came equipped with students! Four young college women live in the 4 bedroom, 2 bathroom apartment that makes up the second and third floor of this old house. Our downsized first floor/basement apartment has its own entrance, but it has definitely put us in contact with our community in a brand new way.
We’ve been in our new house for only a few months, so what is to become of this call is yet to be seen. But already we’ve had more contacts with our neighbors than we had in many years of living in our old neighborhood. The young women upstairs spent a few hours with us in the basement recently when the tornado sirens went off. We’ve loaned them a nativity to use during Advent and sent cookies upstairs after a marathon baking session. Several neighbors were guests at a recent open house.
A wonderful plus is that this action in our personal lives has served as a living parable on transformation for our church. Another church family has sold their home and is building a larger home in an outlying community, hoping to use their new place as a base of entertaining in order to share the good news with friends of their three young sons. Another member of our congregation decided to go ahead with a dream she’s had for some time. She bought a rental house with friends and they have started a ministry to international students in that house. It’s only two blocks from our house! And you know the realtor who helped us find our house? She headed off to help victims of Hurricane Katrina when the call came, because she says she better understands what it truly means to be a missional disciple of Jesus Christ.
We have no idea what new surprises God has in store for us in this amazing adventure. We’re just living it one day at a time. But we can say with assurance, as did a much more famous Kansan, “There’s no place like home!”
Alan and Karen Selig are Co-Pasters, First Baptist Church, Manhattan, KS.