Family room angel

No home should be without one! 

What would Jesus sue?

Trinity Church held its annual meeting Sunday, Jan. 24, which included a budget review.

One of the things discussed was the $32,260 expenditure from the Outreach Fund in 2009, with the potential for spending a similar amount in 2010. 

Like a lot of churches, Trinity has several endowment funds. The guiding rule with an endowment is that it’s OK to spend interest the funds generate, but the principal should never be touched. However, in this case, Outreach Fund principal is being spent to help balance the budget. 

Why? 

Last year The Episcopal Church decided the Diocese of Quincy's bank accounts, including the funds it manages for parishes like Trinity, belong in fact to TEC. Once the lawyers got involved, the banks froze the assets pending litigation.  

Trinity’s White/Knobloch fund, which typically generates $20,000 in interest, is among the Quincy-managed endowments caught in the legal squeeze play. 

Pending resolution (or a court’s “status quo” order unfreezing the interest revenue pending a final decision), Trinity and churches like it have little recourse but to dip into the principal of other investments to maintain operations. They’ll also have to hire lawyers to counter TEC’s claims.

In sum:

• TEC is spending money given to the church to pay lawyers to sue dioceses and encumber diocese and parish assets.
• Without interest revenue from the attached endowments, parishes like Trinity are forced to reduce programs and spend down principal on unencumbered investments to maintain operations. 
• These same dioceses and parishes will have to spend additional money on legal expenses to contest the TEC suits. 

Churches shouldn’t sue churches. 

~ ~ ~

But to the wicked God says:

“Why do you recite my statutes,

and take my covenant upon your lips;

Since you refuse discipline,

and toss my words behind your back?

When you see a thief, you make him your friend,

and you cast in your lot with adulterers.

You have loosed your lips for evil,

and harnessed your tongue to a lie. 

Evangelism 2.0

Dana has a good idea:

“So I took the food left over from the annual meeting to the Rescue Mission Sunday afternoon. One of my friends was staying there and we talked for about 45 minutes. He told me about the different church groups that come to the mission in the evenings to serve food and "give a message." He said the most effective ones were the ones where men from the church came and served the meal and then sat down at the tables with the residents. He said just eating with them and asking "how are you doing" or "what do you need" made greater impact than standing up and preaching to them while they eat. Interesting idea isn't it ... get some guys to together, cook something up, take it down there and eat and talk with those men maybe once a month. I wonder if anyone else might be interested in doing that?”

Definitely something we should try to do. 

We need to think and talk a lot more about evangelism at Trinity and in the Diocese. Spreading the Gospel is the Great Commission, but it’s not something a lot of us know how to do very effectively. 

As Dana’s friend suggests, one approach is to forego the hard sell in favor of showing Christian love and concern for others. Sometimes showing works better than telling. 

* * *

Today's collect: Give us grace, O Lord, to answer readily the call of our Savior Jesus Christ and proclaim to all people the Good News of his salvation, that we and the whole world may perceive the glory of his marvelous works; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Faux apocalypses

I woke up today with a whopping head cold. These things happen.The best thing to do is pretend you don’t notice and make sure you have plenty of Kleenex.

I did pause to wonder, during a bout of Wagnerian sneezing, whether I might have the swine flu. Far better to be sick with a mere cold than the dreaded swine flu (or H1N1, as the pork producers prefer it be called). Swine flu is serious stuff. It can kill you.

But wait a minute. Did I know anybody who has gotten the swine flu? No, not personally. Not a single person. 

Remember the dire warnings about the impending pandemic? Millions were going to die. Everybody was supposed to get a vaccine -- especially children, the elderly, and the sick! But there weren’t enough vaccines! Oh, the anxiety! Man the life boats! Women and children first! 

We often are instructed to worry. Sometimes these warnings serve a purpose. For all I know, the swine flu apocalypse failed to materialize because enough people were vaccinated to nip it in the bud. 

Still, we are encouraged to worry about a lot of things that we can’t do anything about, or that might not even exist. 

Global warming. (Formerly, global cooling.) The economy. The health care crisis (which is a crisis for anybody who doesn’t have coverage, but not most people). Earthquakes, hurricanes and other natural disasters. The world coming to an end in 2012, because that’s all the time the Mayans could fit on the rock they were carving. 

We held our breathes as 1999 rolled over into 2000, having been warned of the horrific impact Y2K might wreak on mankind. The grid could go down! Hospitals without power! Jets falling out of the sky! 

Jesus has some pretty straightforward advice on all of this: “Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life? ... Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself.” And: "Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust also in me."

Those of us who are inclined to worry need to bear that in mind. 

A new coat of paint

“Painting things over” is a metaphor for disguising defects to create the false impression things are better than they really are.

Having spent the weekend painting the upstairs and downstairs halls, the foyer, the stairway and half the living room, I know there is something good to be said for a fresh coat of paint (in this case, two gallons of "Oregon Coast" from Lowe's).

Before you can paint, you have to clean up, get rid of the cobwebs in the corner you've been ignoring, and remove the clutter to make space to paint. Pictures hung in sometimes haphazard fashion come down for rehanging later, and the nail holes are patched with spackling.

When you’re finished, everything looks fresh and new, with a splash of color to dress up the former plain-Jane eggshell white.

Your back may hurt a bit, but the sense of accomplishment makes up for that. Instead of continuing to look past the scuff marks from where one of the kids threw shoes up the stairs, the black scrape from when something got banged into the wall, and all the rest of it, we rolled up our sleeves and did something to brighten up the old homestead.

I guess that’s as good an explanation as any for the purpose of this blog.