Hebrew Scripture Reading—1 Chronicles 28:11-21
There was once a conference for ministers held at a church much like this one. Anxious to learn all they could the ministers eagerly paid their registration fee in the narthex and filed into the sanctuary where the pastor of the church gave the keynote address. The conference was on how to run a successful capital campaign, and the pastor entitled his keynote “The Two Keys to a Successful Capital Campaign.” It was not until the end of his keynote that the pastor shared the two keys. The first key to successful campaign, of course, was money. The second key was to hold a conference about money. The pastor was indeed grateful to all those who had paid their registration fees.
Well, this morning I want to share with you the five keys to a successful capital campaign. The first key is indeed money. As much as we might wish it were otherwise, it does take money to build and maintain a church. The Bible says the love of money, not money itself, is the root of all evil. In the end, what matters is that our money does not direct our love but that our love directs our money.
The other four keys that I want to share with you can all be found in our scripture for today. The second key is a bit more general than holding a conference about money. In passing to Solomon the responsibility for building the Temple, David gave him more than his wealth. Verse 11 says that David gave his son Solomon a plan for the Temple. We would not be good Congregationalists if we did not have a plan after all those committee meetings and congregational meetings in which we made our decisions about the renovation project and the campaign. I used to live in the bay area in California, and you know San Francisco is a little bit different than the rest of the United States. There you will find people who really pride themselves on their left-wing political affiliations. They march around telling everyone they’re a Marxist-lenist, a maoist, a trotskite, an anarchist, or maybe even an anarcho-syndicalist. Well, I used to have a friend who was a highly successful community organizer in San Francisco, and she used to tell people she was a plan-archist, and she was. That was part of what made her successful. Everyone else was focused on proclaiming who they were but she had an actual plan for making the world a better place. We have a plan for our capital campaign, and you will see it unfold week by week over the next month.
The third and fourth keys to a successful capital campaign I believe go together. In our scripture for today, David tells Solomon to be strong, to have courage, and to act. An active, robust courage is the third key to a successful capital campaign. Maybe some of you have realized by now that it takes a bit of courage to do a capital campaign in the midst of the worst recession since the Great Depression. I know when I first started hearing the numbers for the renovation costs I wanted to say “Oh Lordy, isn’t there another way.” Now, if someone had come up to me at that point, patted me on the back, and said, “Be strong, have courage, and act,” I probably would not have felt much better. What rings true for me, however, is what David then tells Solomon. For David and Solomon, having courage isn’t just about wishfully thinking that everything will turn out just fine. What David tells Solomon is that he won’t be alone. He is going to have the priests and the Levites who are dedicated to being of service to the house of God. He is going to have “every volunteer who has skill for any kind of service” that’s needed. And, on top of that, he is going to have “all the people” ready to help him. Courage and strength often come from realizing that we are not alone, that we are a part of a community of people dedicated to supporting each other and working together.
During this past year, I myself have gotten courage from the leadership of our Property and Finance Committee as they have thought through all of our options and helped us arrive at a viable plan. I have also gotten courage from the leadership of the capital campaign and all of the talent and hard work they have put into getting us organized and getting our materials assembled. I have gotten courage as well from all of the people who have spoken up to share with us their ideas either at congregational meetings or house meetings. One of things we might not realize from reading our scripture for today is that the Levites who were so important to Solomon did more than pray. They also baked the bread like some of our members did for the Spring Sale that was so successful. They also served as the lead singers for the faithful like our choir. At the end of our service, Virginia and the choir are going to be leading us in learning a rousing gospel song that I think will help pick up our spirits in the weeks to come.
Amazing things happen when you have a diverse and talented group of people come together for a common cause. One of my all-time favorite sermons was once preached by the father of the legendary gospel singer Aretha Franklin. Her father preached a sermon on the feeding of the five thousand. The title of his sermon was “A Lad’s Lunch.” In his sermon, he talked about how if it wasn’t for a lad’s lunch of loaves and fishes, the five thousand would never have been fed. I know the economy has really hit a number of us hard, and we might feel like all we can give to the campaign is the equivalent of a lad’s lunch. But, what happens when everyone starts to give like the lad with his lunch? Soon there is enough for everyone.
I’ve been inspired by the lad who gave his lunch, and so I have taken a look at my bread basket at home, and I’ve looked into my refrigerator, and I have decided that I can pull together $5,000 to give to our church’s capital campaign over the course of three years. Five thousand dollars might not feed 5,000 families but I think if all of us pool our resources together we will be able to accomplish some remarkable things. Some might even say a miracle.
I think our church is actually well-suited to pull off this miracle. A few weeks ago I was talking with someone on the phone who had visited our church on Easter. She told me that she once attended one of the local mega churches, but what she said she liked about our church was that it felt like we were family. We actually knew each others names. I was thinking about this some more this past week when it occurred to me that on a certain level our church is to mega churches what mom and pop stores are to walmart. Don’t get me wrong I think our church is growing and we are not in danger of folding up as we often hear of mom and pop stores doing. Still, this past week I happened to read an interview Studs Terkel did with the owners of a mom and pop shop in Chicago. The title Terkel gave to his piece was “Ma and Pa Courage.” In the interview, the couple told of how the nice thing that Ma and Pa stores offer that the bigger chain stores can’t is the personal touch. It seems to me that a church really should be a personal touch kind of place, rather than being an impersonal, one-size-fits-all kind of place. Now, Ma and Pa Courage also told of the hardships of running a store like theirs. They had to work long hours, they had small profit margins, they had to deal with the dangers of being robbed by thieves or illegally raided by the police, but at the very end of the interview Ma and Pa Courage shared the key to surviving. The key, they said, is having a family “where everybody pitches in and helps.” It is then that the family has what Ma and Pa Courage referred to as their own “little kingdom.” In our church, I believe we truly live as a family. We all pitch in and help, and I believe it is because we live in this way that we are able to get a glimpse of the kingdom here.
The fifth key to a successful capital campaign is indicated when David tells Solomon that God will be with him. God won’t forsake him. In other words, God cares. I don’t think God’s care is magical in the sense of some hand reaching down from heaven with a million dollars for us, but I think God’s care works its magic through the beating of our own hearts. As children of God, we are a people who care. We care about each other, we care about the world, and we care about this church. More than anything else, I think the key to this campaign is caring hearts, caring hearts that serve as the means for God’s caring love to work wonders. As I was thinking of examples of caring love for this sermon, I kept thinking of stories about mothers. A mother’s love can solve just about any problem, so why not our skylights. I began to think to myself that maybe we need to conduct a scientific theological study of motherly care, so we can figure out how to succeed in this here capital campaign. We need to figure out how to achieve some mother-strength care and love for this undertaking.
Well, this topic is too much for me to handle at the end of a sermon, so we are going to explore this pivotal matter of motherly care and love in greater depth on mother’s day. It’s on that day that we will be honoring one of our very own super-moms: Ollie Stevens. I am not sure how many mothers in this congregation have to use two hands to count all their children, but Ollie has eight kids, so she is definitely a super-mom. In between now and mother’s day, I am going to have to conduct some research about super-mom love and care. I suspect many of you are already experts on this subject. We may even need to host a conference on what I am betting will be the newly discovered secret to capital campaign success. We can invite all the other local churches to attend for a fee, but first let’s all pray for some super-mom power, some super-mom caring, and some super-mom love. Amen.