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This is not an attack on the wealthy, but a more subtle and illustrative way of challenging we who are more willing to change the conditions rather than ourselves. We would much rather spend our time and energy customizing our contexts rather than transforming our minds, thereby renewing our lives.
I am being interviewed live today at 12 ET on Steve Brown, etc.. Check it out.
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Our community has decided to devote the month of March to re-evaluation. We’re spending the month thinking, talking, discerning, and whatever else to get a sense of who we are and, from there, how we express who we are. We are laying everything on the table. Everything. Nothing is exempt from scrutiny! Including my position, the team, the money, the building, the way we do Sunday mornings… everything. I told everyone yesterday that if at the end of the month the majority of people want a real, live leader without all my baggage, then so be it. If we decide that we are tired of playing this game and get off the playing field, then so be it. Everything is negotiable.
A story that comes to my mind is the one where the people are on the edge of the land. They send in 12 spies for 40 days. I feel we are at that kind of critical juncture in our story. The next month or so is going to be spent just spying out the land and seeing what lies before us. I hope it is a good report. I don’t want to be forced to turn around and wander in the wilderness for another proverbial 40 years! There are already lots of ideas buzzing around. I’m trying to encourage everyone to abandon preconceived notions of what they’d like us to be or hope us to be. Let’s go in and get surprised instead! I’m wanting this month to be a month of discovery. And I’m hoping that the vast majority will have the courage to come back and say, “We can take this land! It has been given into our hands!”
The image is the creation of my friend, Howard Nowlan.
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It’s one thing to trust God. It’s another to trust how things are going to work out. I don’t equate the two. I would argue from all view points (theological, philosophical, biblical, etc.) and from experience that to trust one is to not trust the other. They are mutually exclusive.
Our community has recently paid off its mortgage. For the first time in years there’s no financial emergency. We have money. However, this does not necessarily mean that everything is going to be fine now. It doesn’t mean that God is now on our side and that we are necessarily going to succeed. Our community continues to shrink. Key supporters have left and others have stopped supporting. I have no explanation for it. I think we are doing everything we should do. I’m not sure we are doing everything we can do. We’re going to spend the month of March in reflection, gathering our thoughts and trying to discern what is going on with as much honesty as we can muster .
I’ve been having some disturbing dreams lately. I wake up crying sometimes. In my dreams I am asking the men who’ve left to come back. My friends. But they don’t answer. I beg them with tears. It is so tragic, and I wonder just how responsible I am for them leaving. On the one hand, it is an incredibly sad tale of rejection and grief. On the other hand it just seems pathetic of me to be begging. But I miss them all. I want them to come back. They know it. But they don’t return.
And more key people are getting picked off one by one. Some are telling me that they have to cut back in their giving or stop altogether. These are tough economic times and many people aren’t even able to pay their basic bills. Lisa and I included! I know intimately what they are going through! But aside from that: what does this all mean for our community? I cannot predict the future. I wish I could! That’s the concept behind the cartoon this morning. I don’t think it’s possible to know. Oh, I know some people might predict, prophesy and presume, but in my opinion it’s all guess work. Some would like me to believe that if I just trust then everything is going to work out in our favor. Don’t believe it. I trust him and submit to his hand, whatever it brings. And I have no idea what it’s bringing. I hope it is good. But there’s no guarantee. I’m stuck in Job’s proclamation: Though he slay me, yet will I trust him. I love our community. It is beautiful. But like Paul said: to some we are the fragrance of life. To others we are the fragrance of death. I realize how brutal this sounds, but although I hope in him, death always seems to be crouching at our door, and I can’t shake it.
The fine art photograph is the creation of my friend Jorgen Klausen. It pictures the juxtaposition of beauty and the threat death.
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I read Aravind Adiga’s dark novel, The White Tiger. Here’s Publishers Weekly’s synopsis of the story:
A brutal view of India’s class struggles is cunningly presented in Adiga’s debut about a racist, homicidal chauffer. Balram Halwai is from the Darkness, born where India’s downtrodden and unlucky are destined to rot. Balram manages to escape his village and move to Delhi after being hired as a driver for a rich landlord. Telling his story in retrospect, the novel is a piecemeal correspondence from Balram to the premier of China, who is expected to visit India and whom Balram believes could learn a lesson or two about India’s entrepreneurial underbelly. Adiga’s existential and crude prose animates the battle between India’s wealthy and poor as Balram suffers degrading treatment at the hands of his employers (or, more appropriately, masters). His personal fortunes and luck improve dramatically after he kills his boss and decamps for Bangalore. Balram is a clever and resourceful narrator with a witty and sarcastic edge that endears him to readers, even as he rails about corruption, allows himself to be defiled by his bosses, spews coarse invective and eventually profits from moral ambiguity and outright criminality. It’s the perfect antidote to lyrical India.
Although you can gather what the story line is from the above synopsis, it underestimates the book’s moral power. This is a scathing critique of any society’s corrupt dependence on money and power. The whole purpose of the book is not to expose, say, the injustice of class struggle in and of itself, but how class thoroughly permeates relationships and transactions solely for the sake of securing wealth for the more powerful. The hopelessly poverty-stricken Balram learns early to use everything, including eavesdropping on any conversation, in order to escape poverty, and to get and stay ahead. He calls himself a “social entrepreneur”… someone who has learned to use people, relationships, and social mores to succeed. He’s willing to sacrifice his family, his freedom, his conscience… everything and anything… in order to become successful. Neither communism nor capitalism escape this critique. In a wonderful passage, he reveals that he even uses spirituality to succeed in the corrupt world he has chosen for himself, brutally earned for himself, and ingeniously profits from:
Incidentally, sir, while we’re on the topic of yoga– may I just say that an hour of deep breathing, yoga, and meditation in the morning constitutes the perfect start to the entrepreneur’s day. How I would handle the stresses of this fucking business without yoga, I have no idea.
It was when I read this passage that I realized Adiga is critiquing our society’s marshaling of anything in order to profit from it. And it’s true. I’ve always believed it and am becoming more convinced of it. Spirituality is no longer concerned with dying to self in order to live a life of compassion. Now it’s all about winning, succeeding and triumphing. Spirituality has become an accessory for comfortable living. It is just one of the components of happiness, an ingredient for success, and a tool for the acquisition of wealth (I would include power, but even power is nothing in and of itself, for it leads to wealth, the ultimate goal!) In a nutshell, spirituality has become a mask for murder. In Balram’s case literally. But I would argue that spirituality and religion is used to classify, divide, separate, and ultimately alienate people. And this is not just analogous to murder, but is murder. Murder in the heart. Is there any other kind?
In my opinion this book should be read by every student of business and entrepreneurship!
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We burned our mortgage at the church Saturday night. It was quite a celebration. Several Vineyard leaders were there, including Gary and Joy Best, the national directors. They all spoke very affirming and life-giving words over our community. I did burn the actual statement which I and the treasurer signed for the bank stating that our original mortgage was $450,000. And now it is all up in smoke! Along with the mortgage, I also burned several papers that I had what I called the “fine print” of the mortgage… symbolic of the burden we’d been carrying by ourselves ever since the beginning, but the weight of which doubled after our church split down the middle in 1997. The “fine print” were the many negative words, even curses, that had been spoken over our church over the years. Here’s just some of them:
“I suggest you seriously think about closing down the church, selling it all off, and walking away.”
“In order to sustain such a large mortgage, you need to double the size of your congregation within the year.”
“Hello? May I speak with David Hayward. This is so-and-so from the Royal Bank. There are some issues that have come to our attention that need to be addressed immediately.”
Me: “Colin (our treasurer and retired banker), how do we tell the bank that we’re just going to have to trust God in language they can understand?” Colin: “Ha-ha-ha!”
“There are people waiting like vultures for you to die!”
“I predict that in a few years you will have a few people, and that they will have high gifting but low character. Then soon after that you will close as a church.”
“Have you ever considered just shutting the whole thing down?”
“You should get a full-time job so that the church can keep up with its mortgage payments.”
“They got you by the balls!”
“Honey, I shrunk the church!”
“You can always fold.”
“Sure, you can believe in faith and prayer and waiting, but what you need right now is money!”
“Are there any wealthy people in your congregation who can inject large sums of money into the budget?”
“You should start a pledge campaign as well as increase tithing. A little pressure applied in the right place wouldn’t hurt!”
“Your church has no future!”
“I simply can’t see how you can survive another year!”
“Have you ever considered the possibility that the devil used you to destroy God’s work?”
“You are an Absolom, and like Absolom, you and your kingdom will die!”
“Jezebel!”
“You and your church will become the laughingstock of this whole region!”
“We’re going to die! We’re all going to die!”
“Looks to me like you need a miracle!”
Well, that’s enough for now. You get the picture. I had written each of these on sheets of paper. I read them aloud, one by one, and as I read them, I tossed them into the fire, never to have power over us again, God willing. The pungent smell of smoke filled the sanctuary. And it was a beautiful aroma… like incense. The photo is of me burning the mortgage. Nice fire!
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Lisa and I are insurance poor. That’s just one of our problems. We’ve got to figure out ways to bring down these expenses! Late last night, while we were talking about our insurances, we came to the conclusion that we could cut some of them. We are definitely over-insured. If I died she’d be set for life. If she died, I’d be doing very well… financially anyway. I suggest that when I die she just dump me in the river across the street. I’d take care of the rest. Then I said, “I think I could probably bury you for $10,000!” Well we started to laugh uncontrollably. I mean, we couldn’t talk and couldn’t stop. She was laughing/crying like she sometimes does. I said, “I don’t literally mean that. I don’t want to bury you…” and more laughter, in a tragic kind of way. We were laughing so hard that Abby, our dog, was getting nervous and started to whine and bark, finally wanting out of the room. In between fits of laughter, I said I could imagine myself shopping around for the best deal, hoping to have money left over to at least buy a bottle of good scotch. I could joke about fridge boxes and paying myself for doing the funeral. Then, when her laughter/crying started to turn more into crying/laughter, we felt the mood change. This is serious. We looked in each other’s eyes. Oh my love… the road we’ve travelled!
I love this girl! We’ve been together since she just turned 18. I was 21. We got married the next year. Yes, I married a teenager. We both remember talking about when we got married that we would be happy just living in a shack with one single bed and nothing else but the breath of God. That’s all we needed, because that’s all we’d use. We were crazy in love and we were happy… naturally. We are still in love. And the romance is still there. But the happiness has to be fought for. It’s more elusive. It seems that the g-force of life endeavors to suck the happiness out of us and inject dull drudgery into our life and into our love. Money has for too long been the dispenser of our fate. We’re determined to overcome this. And we will. Because we do love each other, and we love our love. We want our happiness to be ours. We want our lives to be filled with delight. We want to restore the joy of our love and the adventure of our lives. We want to return to simpler times, when all we needed was each other and the skin we were in.
This is a photo of Lisa on our first date. Oh man!
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Lisa and I have been talking a lot about money lately. We want to live more simply. We’ve even considered living without credit. We’ve had credit ever since we can remember. By now we have thousands and thousands of dollars accessible to us, immediately, with just one swipe. Which is one reason why we are in the trouble we are in. I mean, we have been victims of trauma, unemployment, failed busines efforts, illness and accidents, but we’ve also become victims of our own consumerism. We live in such a culture that encourages, nurtures and supports this.
But we’ve just realized something: we’ve been trusting our credit. We’ve been walking the high tightrope thinking we’ve been trusting The All in All. In fact, we’ve been trusting the net luxuriously spread out beneath us, waiting to softly catch us should we fall. It hasn’t been him, but Money, that we’ve been serving. Money, the almighty ruling power over our lives. We’ve learned, finally, that we have been serving it. It rules over us, bossing us around, making us happy or sad, strong or weak, abundant or scarce, generous or miserly. And this realization has leaked over into other areas of our lives, so that we question just how much trust we’ve had at all. Or have we been enjoying peace because of our country, life because of our health, happiness because of our many distractions, and our daily bread because of our stuffed cupboards, fridge and freezer? It is strange to see so clearly that debt is Money’s Hell… a place that offers the full luxuries of our imaginations that aren’t real, but borrowed, empty, temporary, and stolen. When seen for what it is, much of debt is the Negative Unreal which is Hell.
It seems that the he is getting shoved further and further into the corner. He’s been less a part of our lives than we thought, less important, less necessary. OR, he’s been in all this, woven throughout this story like a strong thread linking it all together and bringing us to this point of admission. In any case, I’ve discovered that it is the most difficult thing to wean myself from my favorite idol, my most useful and tangible god. But we are determined to make money submit to us, to make it serve us rather than us it. There must be a way to live free and simple, with money in its proper place. There must be a deliverance from this land of slavery to a land flowing with milk and honey.
So… I think I’m going to go ice-fishing and see if any fish have coins in their mouths.
The image is of a painting of mine called “Ice-Fishing”.
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David Hayward is a pastor artistically stripping to the essential.
