Thresholds

I have an unpopular opinion: dislike open floorplans in houses and open-concept kitchens. I especially dislike open-concept kitchens in houses that were not designed with them in mind, where the owners have renovated the old floorplan to include the modern open-concept kitchen.  If you love them, great!  We can disagree on this.  I know that I am biased on this subject.  I live in a 1950’s house on a street with a dozen identical houses with identical floorplans.  Or at least, a dozen houses that were originally built with identical floorplans.  Over the decades, each owner has renovated these houses in unique ways.  When I go for a walk down the street at night, I can occasionally see into their windows and see some of these changes.  Some owners have taken out the center set of walls that divide the first story into three separate rooms in order to retrofit an open-concept kitchen into the 1950’s house.  And I HATE it.  The idea is to open up the space by making one giant room that is subdivided by use while allowing people in each area to still see and talk with one another.  In reality, it makes the first floor feel small and there is no way to hide the mess in one area of the house from the other: i.e. a messy kitchen makes the living room feel dirty and a messy living room makes the kitchen feel cluttered.  The open floor plan also gives the feeling like there is little difference between eating together at the kitchen table and each on the couch.  Lines are blurred as to what room should be used for what and the original flow of the floorplan is disrupted.

In contrast, I have come to appreciate the divisions between the rooms of my house.  Something happens when I cross the threshold from kitchen to the dining room: I can ignore the mess it took to make dinner and focus on spending time with the people around me.  When I enter the family room, my body knows that I can relax and rest from the work I have been doing.  This is the same reason why I change clothes after I come home from work: it is a signal to my brain that I no longer have to be productive. Graduations, weddings, baby showers, and funerals are all social thresholds.  We hold big celebrations for these things like we are crossing from one room to the next.  Some of them are arbitrary lines in the sand but we celebrate them to mark that things have changed, even if the change has been slow and gradual.  Without some of these social thresholds, life just blends together like the open-concept floorplans.  

This Sunday we are crossing a social threshold: worshipping at 11:00 a.m. instead of 10:30 a.m.  This is preparation for the Congregational Church of Birmingham to be worshiping in our building at 9:30 a.m. the following Sunday.  I know there are a lot of emotions wrapped up in crossing this threshold: excitement for new opportunities, fears about our future, hope for what could be, and grief for a future we once envisioned that is now out of reach.  While we are crossing this threshold in a very obvious way now, this threshold represents changes in the world and the Northminster community that have gone unacknowledged for years.  It is as if the mess from one room in an open-concept floorplan has been spilling over into another area.  By talking with CCB, negotiating building use, and decluttering our space, we are having to confront these changes head-on and acknowledge that we have already crossed a threshold.  This Sunday’s change represents a different threshold however: transitioning from being passive in the face of change to being proactive.

Many congregations in recent years have ignored the changing world and the thresholds they have passed over until they blip out of existence.  By confronting things head-on, we are able to recognize what has changed and make efforts to adapt before it is too late.  None of this is easy and there is still a lot of difficult work ahead of us as a community; but I fully believe that it is far less painful to do this work now than wait until the last hour to change.

So, thank you all, for everyone working to make this transition a smooth one.  Thank you to those who have been working on the details of our plan.  Thank you to you who continue to have trust and hope for the future that encourages us all.  I fully believe that this is not Northminster giving up, but Northminster defiantly stepping out in faith that God is still calling us to minister to this community here and now.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.
Pastor Chris