Owning It

Two year-olds are not always good at sharing. On our way to Montreat Conference Center when FBC was about two, he was holding a globe-of-the-world beach ball in his car seat while watching the scenery outside. ”My truck,” he said of the truck that we passed. ”My cows,” he said of the cows grazing in fields. And finally, “my world” as he held onto his beach ball. 

That’s about right for a two year old. Or anyone who acts like a two year old.

The possessive pronoun “my” factors into our spiritual lives on a regular basis. I often hear church people refer to “my congregation” or “my committee.” I hear pastors say “my organist” or “my elders.“ This could be a word that denotes affection or it could denote a subtle form of ownership.

I am currently reading Mark Elsdon’s book Gone for Good: Negotiating the Coming Wave of Church Property Transition and I cannot recommend it more enthusiastically. The notion of ownership impacts everything about Church World from who legally owns the church building to who is the de facto owner of the tea towels in the church parlor.

In the Presbytery I serve, there are more African American Presbyterians than in any other place in the world because of slavery. And in many cases – after Emancipation – the first land that former enslaved people owned was church property. 

And Mark Elsdon points out that . . .

Essentially all land that churches sit on in the United States was at one point home for Indigenous peoples. Jim Bear Jacobs, church leader and citizen of the Mohican Nation, traces the legacy of sin made manifest in the doctrine of discovery that remains in play today when churches buy and sell property (in Chapter Six.)

Imagine the confusion when native peoples who had lived on their property for generations watched European settlers plant flags on their homeland and proclaim that they now owned it. Spiritually speaking, most Indigenous peoples believed that only God could “own land.” How preposterous that men from Spain, France, and England simply showed up and claimed that their human kings and queens now owned it.

The congregations in our Presbytery gather on real estate once the homeland of the Waxhaw, Sugaree, and Catawba tribes. How about your church?

This week I’m thinking about how “owning it” negatively impacts what it means to Be The Church. Dissertations could be written about this phenomenon, but I hope to spark some ideas about how shifting what we believe about ownership might help us be more faithful. Stay tuned.