I wrote this letter to my congregation, Hope Lutheran Church, on September 1st 2022. It is a snapshot in time, and already as I post it here days later more decisions have been made and we continue to clarify our future direction. There may be another letter updating the state of Hope soon. Still, people seemed to like it so sharing here seems like a good idea.
9/1/2022
Dear church,
We have come so far together in recent years. We have
weathered the brunt of the pandemic, the reckoning for racial justice after the
murder of George Floyd, the 2020 election and its violent aftermath, and so
many changes, disruptions, and fears, and losses. In the midst of all that,
Hope Church made the courageous, faithful decision to sell our historic
building on Hazel, adding our personal and communal grief from this loss to all
the other challenges we’ve been facing.
Our decision to sell our buildings and not close our church
was an unusual one, we are told. Nonetheless our choices allowed us to
experience this loss in the classic Christian form of death and resurrection,
and more importantly allowed us to remain together through this journey from
loss to new life.
We gathered on Palm Sunday, the 100th anniversary
of Hope Church, with two bishops and some 250 friends, to celebrate and mourn
and laugh and cry and give thanks for all that God has done through our first
100 years of ministry. Thanks to tireless efforts of so many of you – and your
families and friends – we moved out of our building during Holy Week, the most
absurd and yet most meaningful time of the church year for us to do so. We celebrated
Maundy Thursday by washing feet and sharing Eucharist and welcoming leaders
from The Refuge Church that has since moved into our old space as well as Grace
Lutheran that founded Hope 100 years ago, offering thanks and blessings for
their ministries. Then on Easter Sunday we gathered in our new space, the
chapel at Gustavus Adolphus Church, to experience resurrection in way we had
scarcely imagined in the first 99 years of our existence.
Since then, that little rented chapel has become a home for us,
and tools like Zoom have allowed us to participate in worship and work in new
ways. We have gathered for a series of meetings titled Hopes4Hope, an
intentionally silly name intended to remind us that our current work has been
to ask and answer the questions, “What are our hopes for the future of Hope
Church? What do we want the legacy of Hope Church to be?”
The sale of our building left us with over $700,000 to
steward, knowing that Hope ourselves were unlikely to need that money for the
future of our own ministry. We talked and prayed and conferred with partners
and chose first to give $100,000 to our Saint Paul Area Synod’s Planting Hope
campaign East Side Project. The project is a preschool for children who have
experienced high levels of trauma, and our gift will build a playground – a
playground that will bear the name of Hope Church – as well as supporting other
parts of the project.
Next, we decided to give $100,000 to support the Renewing
Congregations budget of our Synod, which our friend Rev. Justin Grimm oversees
to support new and renewing congregations, stewardship education, and
congregational vitality. Hope has been the beneficiary of such funds through
Good Samaritan Church, my own new mission church work, and other programs and
events, and we are glad to give back so other congregations can benefit as we
have.
This summary brings us to now, and our time for making
momentous decisions is not over yet. We need to address the rest of the funds
from our sale, my future as pastor of Hope Church, and how Hope wants to
continue to exist beyond the expiration of our current lease with Gustavus
Adolphus at the end of November.
A big idea for our sale money, sparked by the inimitable
Larry Cowan, is to create an endowment fund with the ELCA Foundation through
the Saint Paul Area Synod to strengthen the future of ministry on the East
Side. Our working title is the East Side Hope Fund, and the idea is that we
invest a substantial amount of our remaining sale proceeds in this Fund,
financially managed by the ELCA Foundation and programmatically managed by the
Saint Paul Area Synod Council, based on the goals we set and the instructions
we give along with this gift. An endowment primarily spends the interest on a
fund, not the principal, so this is intended to be a long-term part of Hope’s
legacy.
Part of the benefit of this idea is that individuals and
other churches could add to this fund later, so that any of us could add to
Hope Church’s legacy of commitment to ministry on the East Side. Our partner congregations
in our East Side Collaborative, along with other ministry partners, could both
benefit from this Fund and also contribute to it as their situations change in
the coming years. Initial responses to this idea from our partner congregations
and from Synod staff have been very positive, and we just need to do the work
of placing parameters around how this money would be used. If you have ideas
for how this fund could benefit the East Side, Sally Young is compiling those
ideas so please share them with her.
Along with that idea for long-term investment of our sale
proceeds, we also have some ideas for investing directly with ministry partners
for more immediate use, as we did with our previous two gifts to the Synod.
Among those ideas is a financial gift to spur the next year our East Side
Collaborative ministry efforts, a gift to honor Hope’s former Education Fund,
and a gift to support the ongoing Hmong ministry of Good Samaritan Church, now
known as Eternal Flame Hmong Lutheran Church. These figure to be smaller
investments that reflect our values to broaden Hope’s legacy.
As for myself, I continue to enjoy my time as Pastor of Hope
Church and as a Mission Developer for the Saint Paul Area Synod. It has been
such a blessing and a sacred honor to walk with Hope through all the challenges
and changes, and I want to express here my deep appreciation for the trust you
have placed in me through this time.
My professional goal is always to work myself out of a job.
That is to say, I always intend to move and grow a church beyond my
leadership’s capacity to continue on a healthy path. Planning for the
disbursement of our building sale proceeds has been a vital and life-giving
part of my work with Hope this summer, and when that work is done, I believe
Hope will no longer need me, and that my gifts and skills will best be used
elsewhere. Also, supporting a full-time pastor at Hope has been a substantial
financial burden for years, and soon we will reach a point where it is no
longer good stewardship of Hope’s resources to do so.
I had planned to become the quarter-time pastor of Hope
while focusing on starting a new church, but that plan changed as I have
continued to lead Hope’s discernment about Hope’s money, legacy, and future. I
have so enjoyed this process of transition that I feel called to walk with
other congregations through similar processes, which could look like doing
Intentional Interim ministry in our Synod.
I am committed to serving Hope Church while we make these
substantial decisions about our money and our future, and we have reached the
time to make those decisions. I believe it is possible for Hope to finalize
plans for our sale proceeds over the next couple of months, and because I love
tying transition into the life and timetable of the wider church, I can
envision Reformation Sunday or Christ the King Sunday as potential times to
conclude my service to Hope Church.
Which brings us to the future of Hope Church itself. Hope is
a community of faithful people who love each other and have followed Jesus
together through some incredibly challenging times. You have been there for
each other. You have done difficult things other churches could scarcely dream
of. Believe me when I say your faith and the ways you live out that faith have
been an inspiration, to me and to many others, through the process of our sale
and move and partnership with other East Side churches. A huge – and wonderful
– part of my job this summer has been telling church leaders the story of Hope
and inspiring them to re-imagine what faithfulness can look like in a historic
Lutheran congregation.
What is next for Hope Church, after we have disbursed the
proceeds of our building sale? This is the remaining question you all need to
answer. My input on this question has limited value, particularly because I
believe Hope will no longer need my leadership after that time. At our most
recent Hopes4Hope meeting on August 30th, two possibilities emerged.
The first is that Hope could continue to exist and contract
with Gustavus Adolphus Church for worship and pastoral services. Our lease in
the chapel at Gustavus Adolphus runs out at the end of November, and we are
unlikely to renew that lease. Why rent our own space and struggle to find
pastors when we could just go across the hall and worship with GA? They have
been incredibly hospitable to us, and we have begun to build relationships of
trust and mutual support. Pastors John and Amanda have each stated their
commitment to support Hope Church in whatever ways they can moving forward. Those
pastors, along with our new East Side Collaborative Intern Becky Sliva, could
cover the pastoral needs of Hope Church as it continues beyond my time here.
The other possibility would be that Hope Church would decide
to close, ending its time as an ELCA congregation and beginning its time as a
community of people who love Jesus and one another and don’t need to go to
meetings to prove it. I would hope the people of Hope continue to gather for
meals and celebrations, honoring the legacy of Hope Church and the deep
relationships you’ve formed over the years. One version of this could see Hope
choosing to merge into Gustavus Adolphus Church, giving everyone a place to
land together as a community. Another option would be the people of Hope
intentionally exploring other congregations to see what fits best for each of
you after Hope is no longer a Sunday morning worshiping community.
When I first interviewed with Hope Church, even before you
called me as pastor, I said that one of my goals would be to allow the faithful
leaders of Hope Church to retire from church leadership and meetings and move
on to following Jesus together in more fruitful and enjoyable ways. Meetings
and paperwork and decisions tied to our building used to swallow up our energy
for ministry, and now that we are free from the burden of building maintenance,
I still want to further free Don and Larry and so many of the rest of you from
meetings and decisions about the fate of the church. I know you all have so
much to give to the future of the church – the whole church – beyond the entity
of Hope Church. My advice to you would be to retire from the work of Hope that we’ve
been doing over these years, sit toward the back of a new congregation on
Sunday morning, and then figure out how your gifts and experience that serve
the church and follow Jesus moving forward.
But again, the future of Hope cannot be and must not be my
decision. I will go and serve the church in other places, and you will continue
to be the church in whatever form you choose. Hope will certainly continue
beyond me, and you get to decide whether you want that to be as a formal ELCA
congregation or simply as a legacy of love and funding for ministry on the East
Side of Saint Paul.
Thanks,
Pastor Andrew
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