Beautiful and Terrible Things

 Read an excerpt from the book

Epilogue: Hope Rising

“The space I inhabited in the days after my job at the Riverside Church ended was a place of lost dreams. One day I was one of the most prominent preachers in Amer­ica, the next I was unemployed and disgraced. When I call those days to mind, the blood still rushes to my cheeks, along with feelings of shame and disappointment and old narratives of not being good enough.

And yet even the unfairness and hurt in that moment weren’t insurmountable. Each experience I’ve recounted here—the death of Chloe, the despair of Jesse, and the rest—was a handhold that I could grab on to to climb the next mountain in front of me. My heart is full, not with anguish for loss but with gratitude for the love of each person who found me and helped me find others. I am thankful for every relationship that reinforced my belief that new life can come out of even crippling desolation.

Sitting in my apartment one morning wondering what it was that people did when they didn’t work, I began to think about a question I’d been pondering for some time. What’s next? What’s next for the Church, for the institu­tion I have loved and served for so long? Despite our best efforts, a pastor’s love for the Church is often unrequited, and that is becoming more and more true; some studies say that upward of five thousand churches in America are closing every year. But surely the message of Jesus—love of God, love of neighbor—does not end with the final closing of a building’s doors, right?

I began to think about some of my friends in Great Britain and the innovation they had been long applying to institutional expressions of faith. A coffee shop, an art gallery, a food truck—these were all serving as meeting spaces for spiritual community. I realized that my calling to create spiritual community did not need to be restricted to the confines of a church. Beyond the walls of a church, was this now something I could help foster, something to climb toward? I was curious about this, and I knew that I would arrive at another meaningful space to serve—even if I didn’t know exactly where or how. So I booked a plane ticket to Heathrow.

Scrolling through the news one lazy morning during my visit to London, I came across an article reporting that religious institutions in America hold more assets than Google, Microsoft, and Apple combined—trillions of dol­lars. My mind started spinning and I pulled out a journal and began thinking on the page. I thought about my experiences at Calvary, leading an institution that was trying to decide what to do with its considerable assets. And I started wondering, Where is all that money going? Through a theological lens: Who are we going to be in the world? How do we build a community with what we have? What is right and just and good?

Churches own land, buildings, intellectual property. What’s happening to the money generated by these hold­ings? I’m a pastor, not a real estate investor, and I don’t know anything about assets and funds and all the myster­ies of the financial world. But I tried to summon up a theological framework, a kind of “being the Church,” that would allow people of faith and institutions holding lucra­tive assets to convert them into fuel to empower good, healing, just, community-building, holy work in the world. The endeavor certainly couldn’t be represented as a narra­tive of religious decline or a theology of scarcity; it would have to be framed as a reclaiming of the central story of Christian faith: death and resurrection. As churches around the country are closing, selling their land, and divesting themselves of their assets, I won-dered: If Church is not God and God exists far outside the walls and fences of the buildings and land, how could a community of believers still serve and positively affect the communities that had nurtured them and could still need them? Could the money be used to create Church without physical location? What could a church look like if it wasn’t a building, and what could that mean for the people who need a spiritual home? I’ve been the pastor of three large, historic churches— though with those enterprises, the same theological questions with regard to endowments were present. After I was freed from the constraints of those physical buildings, my mind opened in new directions. Instead of clinging to tradition, I wanted to bravely imagine a new way of being Church in the world. What can we do to empower the work of God on earth, even if it looks like something new? I want to look around and find “faith communities” that are noticing God at work in new ways and places. I want an open- minded and openhearted redirection of resources toward those unexpected glimpses of God. In London with my friends, I visited bakeries and shops, nursery schools and bridge clubs, gardens and craft markets— places where communities gathered. The thoughts I had been turning over about new kinds of churches began to come together. I saw that Great Britain was ahead of us in the process of churches going out of business, and they were also thinking in new and creative ways about how to be people of justice and light, followers of God, in a world with significantly fewer brick-and-mortar churches.

Toward the end of my travels in England, I met a man who was helping a very wealthy friend give away his for­tune anonymously. He was part of a small group of people around Great Britain who identified projects in their com­munities that were changing unjust systems. They reached out and got to know the people who were building these businesses and they just gave them money: small, unre­stricted grants to help them keep at the work. That’s it.

And then that man said something that changed every­thing for me. “It’s been twenty-three years,” he told me, “and we’ve just given all the money away. If you look around, you will see that almost every successful social en­terprise in Great Britain today has had some connection back to those donations.”

I got goosebumps when I heard that, and I still do whenever I recall that conversation, because my mind sud­denly recognized the teachings of Jesus I’d preached from storied pulpits for decades. It was Jesus who told parable after parable about sowing seeds, trying to teach his dis­ciples that the abundance of God is available to us all, that we can build a world where everyone thrives if we have the courage to live with open hearts and open hands, meeting God anywhere God’s work of justice and healing is hap­pening. And this is how Invested Faith was born. My trip to England and the people I met there led me to become the (unlikely) founder of an investment fund.”