What can I give Him, poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;
If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part;
Yet what I can I give Him: give my heart.
(Christina Rosetti, from “In the Bleak Midwinter”)
I get a smile on my face as I recall how in March of 2020 I was having conversations with the session about being back in the sanctuary for regular in-person worship by Easter of that year. We are now 20 months beyond that time and the hoped-for return to normalcy has not yet materialized. One third of us are back in the sanctuary for worship on Sundays and two thirds of us are worshipping on Zoom. The staff and program of the church look substantially different. The 70 chairs we have removed from the sanctuary and stacked up in the narthex serve as an apt metaphor for our current reality.
But here’s what hasn’t changed: God still loves us. Jesus is still Lord. The Spirit is still brooding over the waters of our chaos breathing new life into being. And Emmanuel Presbyterian Church is still here. Maybe those chairs in the narthex are our version of the large stone, the Ebenezer or Stone of Help, of 1 Samuel 7 that reminded the people that the “Lord has brought us safe thus far.”
Who would have predicted in February 2020 that in December of 2021 we would have in place tools that allow us to host 2/3 of our worshipping congregation in someplace other than the sanctuary? Who would have known that in the even in our absence from our building we would continue to significantly pay down the principal on our mortgage ahead of schedule? Who would have guessed that while our doors have been closed, we would be welcoming into our worship services several visitors, new members and former members who have moved away?
The Lord has done far more than keep us safe. We are being welcomed into a new day and a new way of being the Church of Jesus Christ.
So I am writing to encourage you to keep up the good work and help us to address one of the ways that the pandemic has changed our life together by disrupting some of our habits. In spite of all of the good things I report above, one difficulty we are facing is that our year-to-date unrestricted giving (the money you give that we use for our basic everyday expenses) has decreased by a little over $21,000 in 2021. In other words, this time last year you had given about $21,000 more than you have given this year. This is not a cataclysmic problem. We have reserves to cover this. But that solution of using reserves is not a sustainable one beyond this year.
Even if you have not been infected with the Covid-19 virus, it has hit us all in a variety of ways. At the most basic level it has disrupted our rhythms and invited us to evaluate once unquestioned habits. At deeper levels it has brought us to places of anxiety about things like our kids’ development, wellbeing and education, our financial situation, our health, and our loss of relationships. We are as a congregation in amazingly good shape in spite of all of this. Your good will and flexibility have helped us to persevere. Our monetary reserves have helped us to finance both our shortfall and some major improvements to our building and grounds. But we also have to acknowledge dips in giving trends, think more deliberately about our priorities and thus identify when and where we will need to spend some of our savings and at what point we will stop dipping into those reserves as we face into questions of long-term sustainability.
This is not an unfathomable problem that immobilizes us; we will get through this. But we will also need to acknowledge that solutions will not come by simply waiting for things to open up and get back to normal. We are already in that proverbial "new normal" and this will require us to step up and work together on how we are going to deal with the new realities delivered up to us by the circumstances of our day. I am pretty sure that things will not go back to being the way they were, instead we will have to receive and respond to the changes this pandemic has made.
At the most basic level I write to ask you to continue give toward the support of this congregation. But more than that I am asking you to bring an offering. When we bring an offering we offer up our best to God and wait to see what God will do with it. Determining what is our best is a matter settled in the quietness and privacy of our own hearts. That kind of offering is not something that can be compared with what others do. It is not something that simply responds to news of specific costs and deficits. It is a matter of articulating our gratitude to God for something we have received. When we bring an offering we do not need to worry about the question of having enough because we will be giving in response to God and therefore operating on the assumption that we will have what we need to do the work that God has called us to do.
Dave Rohrer
12/20/21
You can contribute to Emmanuel online at www.epcbothell.org. Click on the word “Contibute” and the right end of the menu headings on the Home page. This will take you to our online giving portal.