The Hotel Alex Johnson in downtown Rapid City is celebrating it’s 85th anniversary. It is a remarkable feat these days around here for a building to have the same use for 85 years. There are hotel chains who are throwing up motels with business plans that call for a complete return on investment within 20 years and the construction in some of those buildings is such that it almost guarantees that they won’t be in use 50 years from their construction date. We see many things in our society as disposable. There are places in the world where the people shake their heads in disbelief at the way we tear down and build up and then tear down and build up again. When we were visiting in France, we stayed in a home that had been in the same family for more than 200 years. You won’t find any of those in Rapid City.

As our church begins preparations for our 135th annual meeting, we are in the midst of a season of capital investment in our 54-year-old building as we seek to provide a building for future generations that will serve our community for decades to come. It is the longest our congregation has occupied a building.

It did occur to me as I read the article ini the newspaper about the hotel’s anniversary, that the church at 715 Kansas City Street which was home to our congregation for more than four decades, will be 100 years old next year. Celebrating the centennial of the building will be Faith Temple Church of God in Christ. The congregation isn’t as old as its building, but the building has been in continuous use as a church for a century.

Buildings are always challenges for churches. There have been many occasions in the history of the church when the focus on the building has been central. The great cathedrals of Europe were massive building projects. Some took more than a century to be completed. The cost of some of those buildings was incredibly high compared to the means of the people who worshiped in them.

For many of us, the building is not as important as other aspects of church life. Faith, fellowship, study and service take precedence over the places where we engage in those activities. Our congregation has tried to maintain balance, always focusing on serving the community. But providing that service has required a home and that home is expressed in a building. We have tried to have a balance of purely utilitarian structure with artistic expression that inspires the people and lifts our spirits. I think we’ve done a pretty good job for the most part.

The challenge of investing the church’s funds wisely remains. We are in the process of putting the finishing touches on a new and expensive sound system. After deciding that communication is a core business of the church and wanting to provide a system that enables all of our members to hear clearly, we developed specifications, advertised for bids, selected a contractor and had the system installed. Like all modern electronic systems, there are a few glitches, but we expect that we can resolve those problems easily.

In the process, we have been left with a large pile of electronic components from the old sound system. They will be carefully sorted to see if there are any things that can be sold, recycled, or reused in other places. Several of those components were purchased new in the time that I have been pastor of the congregation. As I looked at the old parts and pieces I wondered if there would be any components of our current sound system that would still be in use 20 years from now. With the rapid rate of change in electronic technologies, is there anything in the investment we just made that will be usable a few decades from now.

We throw away a lot of used electronic components each year in our society. We replace things that work well simply because there is something new available. In our office a computer is considered to be old at 5 years, in need of replacement at 7 years. When we buy such devices we don’t expect to be using them 10 years from now. It bothers me to be investing the church’s funds in things that we know won’t last. On the other hand, we need computers to do our job. We need to keep in touch with our members, provide a reasonable Internet presence, and produce our printed documents in an efficient manner. We have become dependent upon computers to keep our records.

I suppose that one might make a similar argument about our mission and outreach projects. We respond to a disaster and soon there is a new disaster. We feed hungry people, and there are more hungry people to be fed. We work with our partners to help our neighbors, but have done little to eliminate poverty in our own neighborhood. In Matthew 26, Jesus says, “The poor you will always have with you.” His statement was in no way an invitation to pretend that poverty doesn’t exist or to ignore the call to serve others. But he was making it clear to his disciples that serving others is a continual process, not a task that can be completed and then abandoned.

So much of life in a church is about balancing divergent concerns and demands. We don’t want to be about building an institution that demands ever more resources just to sustain its self. But we need some structure to continue to grow our capacity to serve others. We don’t want to spend all of our funds on our building, but we don’t want to be borrowing from future generations by allowing our building to deteriorate.

So as we wish “happy birthday” to the Alex Johnson, we are seeking to make wise investments in our own building with a prayer that it will be around to serve the people of our community for more generations.

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