Al Strauss: Church Space and Modern Ministry

You know, one of the things that I said is, and I remember saying this now, is I said, you know, have one of your grandkids come in and ask you what your church smells like, because a lot of times our churches are so old and has old furniture and stuff.

It smells like it's a nursing home, and a young family's not interested in that. Welcome to Mindful Leader. This is Dennis Shaw. I'm the host of Mindful Leader, have been since its beginning. I'm a retired elder at the Mountain Sky Conference, the United Methodist Church. And Mindful Leader attempts to focus on leadership conversations that are for both laity and clergy at the local church level. Most of my focus right now is with Mountain Sky and the United Methodist Church,

but I'm trying to branch that out a little bit. For example, my next guest is Mandy McDowell, and she is the pastor at Los Angeles First. We will speak to her on the 16th of December. And Mandy's church has inherited paradise and paved it and put it in a parking lot. That's sort of the joke because they don't have a building. They have a parking lot, and she's going to talk a little bit about how they do that.

My guest after that is going to be Rob Abbott, who is a guide at Gettysburg, a Gettysburg battlefield. And he's going to talk to us a little bit about how we might be able to use some concepts of leadership from the battle at Gettysburg and use it at the local church. And for those of you that may go, what? Jeremiah Harris and Bryce and Lily, who are Mountain Sky Conference pastors in Longmont, are going to be part of the guest there as well.

Tracy and Steve Reinhart have agreed to be guests sometime in January, and we're going to talk to them about health, about how to be healthy and how to get yourself focused. One of the things that they use is the idea of creating new habits, and in our creation of new habits, we create ourselves. So that's where we're going to go with that. I don't have a date on that one yet, but it'll be in January sometime and sometime in January we're also going to talk about the issue of call.

Probably maybe myself in a conversation with a friend of mine. We'll see some details. The conversation today is with Al Strauss. I'll get into some of the introduction of Al during our conversation. But Al spoke at annual conference in Casper, Wyoming for the Mountain Sky Conference and it was a bit rushed. And and so I wanted to come back and give Al a chance to draw out a little bit more about what he was going to talk about.

So our conversation will be sort of focused on what he got to say about some of the changes that are coming up in the next five to 10 years. And even though this is a mountain sky conversation, my guess is that what we're saying is true of other conferences as well, other denominations as well, in which they're facing probably the same kinds of considerations, same kinds of facts.

I confess to you, the second half of the conversation is a little more free-flowing, and it's a little more, which I thought was what Al wanted to talk about. And so if the first part bothers you or bores you, do me a favor, just keep hitting 30 seconds advance until you get to the second part, and I think hopefully it'll be there for you.

Again, this is Dennis Shaw, and I just want to say thank you for listening to Mindful Leader. God bless you. Thank you for being here. Bye-bye. Let me welcome you back to Mindful Leader. This is still Dennis Shaw. He hasn't gone anywhere. And as I indicated before the break, my guest today is Al Strauss. And I always say, good to see you, Al. Of course, the rest of you can't see Al, but I do. I record these on Zoom, but you don't see that. So, good to see you,

Al. It's always good to see you, too. I wanted to talk to Al about his speech, and obviously the speech has backstory associated with it, at annual conference this last June in Casper. And Al is stepping down as the leader of the conference board of trustees, the Mass of the Mountain Sky Conference board of trustees. He's going to stay on one more year as an at-large member to sort of help the transition from him to Jeremiah Harris. Do I have that right?

Yep, that's correct. Okay, Jeremiah Harris. Now, there were people who heard it. There were people who heard about it. And there were people who didn't hear it at all and haven't heard about it. So, Al, can you give me a short précis of what you had to say? And you don't need to give me the whole 10 minutes of it, but can you give me a couple of minutes of what you said and what you had to say? And we'll get to the why and backstory in a few seconds.

So what did you say at annual conference as your departure as the leader of the trustees? First, I was trying to start off by explaining to the conference that we have probably our biggest obstacle coming to us in the future is going to be property insurance. I've been talking to lots of different insurance companies. People. And they've all said that we can expect double digit growth or increases in our premiums every year for the next 10 years.

And we're already finding churches that can't pay it currently. And you continue to look at like this year, it's going to be 14% is going to be the average for each Methodist pastor. And so I try to lay out the concern that insurance is not going to be a problem that is going to be solved overnight. I try to put forward the vision of what the trustees have done. And I had admitted that I had been on trustees for eight years and I hadn't. Seen this issue coming as big as it was.

And that really we should have seen this issue coming 20 years ago and started working on it. And so our long-term plan, and there's no short answer to this. We're going to go through a time of sacrifice to get to where we need to be. But our long-term goal is, as our churches close, that we take a large portion of the proceeds of selling closed churches and put it into an endowment that would go to us moving towards self-insured. Okay. And that was the beginning gist of my message there.

Okay, and look, can we put a bookmark in that just for a second? And so for those who don't know what self-insured might mean, I think to me it's pretty self-explanatory, but would you give us about a 15-second idea of what self-insured means? Sure. Kind of what the plan would be, we would cover all the damage that would happen that an insurance company would cover for a church with the funds that we have saved.

And then your next year's premiums would basically be however many claims we had. We just divided amongst the churches, depending on church size and building size budget and stuff. And liability would be part of that? So liability would be part of the self-insurance? Yeah, liability could do that, but we would probably make that just a standard premium payment each year. Okay.

Okay. All right. I'm sorry to interrupt you. I just want to make sure that for the uninitiated, they had some idea what you were driving at. So you made the comment that long-term goal was to see if we could perhaps move to long-term—I mean, excuse me, long-term goal was to see if we could move to self-insurance, and then I interrupted you, so forgive me. Why don't you pick back up there?

And then the short-term things that we can do to help, I then talked about the water and heat sensors that come with the cost of your premiums. You can get them at Church Mutual website that will detect if your furnace isn't working or your boiler or if water is entering the area where your sensors is at so that we have warnings ahead of time before real serious damage happens. We can stop it before real serious damage happens and the costs of water.

The claims would go down and then the cost of premiums would go down because of that. I also talked about the fire. Places are in a high fire zones. Looking at what Estes Park is doing, they've done it all. And unfortunately, Estes Park is having a heck of a time trying to find insurance, even though they're the ones that have done everything that you can possibly do and still be in a fire zone. And then the third part of that speech was then to look at liability issues that we can control.

I put out there that 30% of our clergy had not finished their ethical training this year. That's required by discipline and encouraged us to get that done. And then also just take a look around your churches for trips, slips, and falls.

That that's our biggest our biggest liability claim every year we have aging population in our churches and it's not that these these church members sue us for millions of dollars but what happens is somebody falls i'll give you an example one church a lady fell and broke her arm and the church did the right thing and made the claim because there were branches that were over the stair railing, and the outside light was burnt out, and she was walking at night.

So they did the right thing. They made the claim, and then the insurance company covered the surgery for her shoulder. But I can't remember. I think it was like $40,000 at the end of that. And it ends up being a lot of $40,000 to $80,000 claims of trips and falls. And so I was really trying to get people to, to look at that. And then all that part went pretty well. And then when I was really trying to get the last bit in, the last minute, when it kind of got fiery.

I tried to end with, and we take our buildings too much as sacred space and put more value in our buildings than we actually do in our ministries. That's the part I remember. That's the part I remember distinctly. Yeah, go ahead. I'm sorry. Yeah.

And I was trying to help people to see that, look, and not every church can do this. Small town churches don't have people banging down their door to buy their buildings, but other places, our buildings are tools. And those tools have outlived their usefulness and they're aging, they're oversized, they're not efficient. And it costs us an exorbitant amount of money every year to maintain those buildings.

And I was trying to set forward a vision of possibly selling those buildings or repurposing a huge portion of the buildings like in low-income housing. Or if we sell the buildings, buying a space that's significantly smaller, reducing your building costs. And that was what I was hoping to get across. And before I go to the hoping, and we've had some of that has happened where we have, I mean, I want to say there was a church in the Denver suburbs that had a building

that, was it Inglewood? No, Westminster. Westminster. Yeah, Westminster. Okay, all right, go ahead. They just sold their building and moved in with another building, another church. Simpson. Yeah, Simpson. And they're using the funds from the sold building to help support their ministries. And then they sold the building to a low-income housing company that's tearing down the building and putting up low-income housing there. Which in that Westminster site, that's an excellent use of space there.

Okay. You also have Cedar Ridge up in the mountains. Yeah. Boy, what they're doing, they're spectacular. It's a church of 13 people. They sold their parsonage and they sold their church building. And they're going to have a million dollars at the end of it. Plus, they're going to have a new church that's 2,000 square feet. And so, you know, for 13 to 50 people, that's a good size. That's the right size building. And they're putting up townhouses where the church and the parsonage was.

And they'll have one of the townhouses as a parsonage. The work that they've been doing out there, I mean –, They're going to, they've kind of set their financial, their financial path for the next 20 years. And so they're doing spectacular.

Powell, Wyoming, they sold their building and are now starting a federation with the Presbyterian church in their building and going to be using the proceeds from the sale of their building to create a building endowment to maintain the Presbyterian building.

I'm i'm always but most people who ever met me haven't heard me talk about this but i, i i personally find these unified and federated churches to be a little problematic in how we go about dealing with them uh they sometimes take on the flavor of the lead pastor so if the lead pastor's a presbyterian it's becomes a a more present presbyterian kind of polity and the way its relationship is. But there's clearly some exceptions to that. Rifle is a good example.

I mean, Rifle has been a Presbyterian Methodist church forever. And boy, is the relationship between the conference and Rifle just superb. And I hear your concern there. I see that all the time as well.

I fully agree with you that oftentimes it's hard to find that balance between, what denomination you kind of connect with yeah that last part you mentioned would it be fair for me to sort of summarize that who didn't hear it as it was al strauss's observation that we've lost our way as to what's important we've gotten to a place where we're worshiping the wrong thing and we're not focused we're not focused on our mission where our mission has become the maintenance and sustainment

of the building and not the maintenance and sustainment of the ministry of Christ and the world to go make baptized teach. Is that a fair summary? Yeah, I'd say that's a pretty fair summary. I probably said it harder than I needed to, but yeah, that has been my concern of every church I go to. And I've served, because I've been in cooperative parishes pretty much my whole ministry. So in 22 years, I've served in 24 churches.

And every single one of them, they have a special, unique church building that they feel is extra special and has to be maintained. And the idea of making a move or a transition to some different building is problematic. Yeah. It's where I did my internship in Arlington, Virginia. They went through about a three- or four-year exercise recently where they literally tore down the 100-year-old building.

Somebody came in and put high-rises in there. I think they're condominiums or I'm not sure who the target is specifically. And they gave them the top floor in perpetuity. So they can park in the building and they can have this upper floor in perpetuity. And they've got a building. The building now is solving housing needs and they've still got worship space. It took them three years of being worshiping somewhere else in order to get there.

But that's the way it was. But even there, this was my grandmother's building. This was my grandmother's church. And so I don't want to sell my grandmother's church.

I don't want to be on the board of trustees or a voting member of this church that says it's okay to sell this church. My grandmother found Jesus here and blah, blah, blah, whatever. Yeah. Well, my church I serve freely right now, we're going through that. We've sold our building, 40,000 square foot building that costs us about $75,000 a year to maintain. And we're currently building a 10,000 square foot building that we project will cost us about $9,000 to $11,000 a year to maintain.

I didn't know you were doing that. Yeah, and it took a lot of visits, a lot of tears, a lot of vision work. But once the vote to the church came up, it was a 99% approval. Well, Dan O'Neill was the treasurer CFO for the conference, I want to say, from 1999, maybe earlier than that, but late 90s. But anyway, into, I think it was 2006, 2007, when he stepped down. And one of the portfolios the treasurer has, of course, is property.

And he used to regularly say to anybody that listened to him that it was his observation that once a building got to be 50 years old, we needed to get ourselves figuring out a way to move from that building to another building. Because he, I mean, it was complicated. It wasn't as simple as just because it's 50 years old, but it was his observation, I think, to some extent was we got into a habit of worshiping the building as opposed to worshiping in the building.

So, yeah. Yeah, we'll be putting a building endowment in with the sale of our property. And in that endowment, they have to, every 20 years, have to take a hard look at the building and ask if it's still a useful tool. And where we're moving to, Greeley's the fastest growing community in the United States this year. They're expected to grow by 37%. Wow. And it's all seven miles to the west of us. And really downtown isn't really one that invites people in.

It's kind of a congested and hard place. So we're moving out to where all the growth is. But in 15, 20 years, they need to readjust or relook at, is this where we're growing or has growth shifted to another location and do we need to move again? Well, biologically, I once have heard the statement, if you're not growing, you're dying. Absolutely. Absolutely. Realizing that this was a long time before you got to Greeley, but wasn't Genesis a Greeley event?

And we tried that for about five or six years in the early 2000s, and I think we shut that down about 2006, 2007. Does that sound about right? Yeah, I don't know the exact years on that, but yeah, they did try to have a new church start that sprung out of the downtown Greeley to create a Greeley West church. They used a lot of the young families, and unfortunately, it didn't pan out. And then those young families never came back to the downtown church either.

So it was a double loss. Yeah, it was a difficult choice. But it was in this area you're talking about, am I right? Yeah, yeah, it was. Okay, all right. I mean, Al, you've been around. I mean, I know you've been down at, let's see, I'm trying to think about, you've been at Cortez. Were you at Ordway for a little while? No, I wasn't in Ordway. Fort Morgan? Fort Morgan, Folio. Yeah. Akron, Julesburg. I've been around.

I was going to say, those are all Colorado zip codes. I used to tease people who came to Utah, and I would tell them that the conference only sends the best to Utah. So although you're good, you apparently didn't rise to the level of being part of the best. I still have a couple more years I can only dream. Okay.

Going back to the al i i hope you don't mind me saying this but i i did get a sense particularly towards the end of your dialogue at annual conference there was either one of two things or maybe both going on and my sense was you were either frustrated or you were angry or you were both i could be wrong about that but that seemed to be that it might is that i guess first question is is that a is my memory of that is that was my take on that reasonably accurate yeah yeah like i think my

my my emotions came out but that's good sometimes yeah yeah and then i was also pressed for time trying to put too much into a into a time segment and so as i the faster i spoke you know that energy was there and i just kind of fed off that and then my emotions just kind of came out at the end. So, yeah, I think, man, until you've sat as the chair of the trustees for a year, you really don't know the pressures that are on the conference and being able to, like.

Cover insurance. Well, my year as chair, we lost 19 churches insurance coverage and trying to get them covered. And we had a 32% increase in property insurance that year. Well, I mean, for those of you who don't know this, I was on the Council of Finance Administration twice. I was on from 2006 to about 2014.

And then I came back on about 2016, 2017 and i stayed till 2023 so i was i was on twice so i have some sense not to the same degree that you do and i will say to you that one of the things that the council on fines administration did i thought was we deferred quite a bit to the financial requirements of the board of pension health benefits and the trustees rather than bang somebody over the head about why they're not paying their mission shares, their apportionment,

we would sometimes try to look at what the larger, the bill was on the other side, which was pension and health or insurance. No, absolutely. And finance has done really a helpful job of making sure churches are insured and pastors have their benefits. But we're moving to a place where, I don't have the exact count with me right now, but We have a number of churches that aren't paying their apportionments, and they're not paying their insurance premiums either.

And so the conference has to come up with the funds to pay for those premiums, or we start to have to have a conversation of, well, when do we move to help these churches gracefully close? Or, I was going to say, or you actually, you went where I was going, or we just help them close. Yeah. Which sounds, I know, I'm sure there's somebody who just heard me say that, who went crazy and maybe even cut off the podcast. But I think to me, it sort of depends upon context.

I mean, small town Wyoming, there's no United Church of Christ.

There's no Episcopalian. There's no PCUSA. I'm sure I've forgotten somebody as a mainline, American Baptist in there and we are the only mainline presence in the town I think we have incumbent responsibility if we can possibly stay open to stay open so because we provide a different voice a different voice about who Jesus is and how you might see Jesus in the world in a different way than somebody that sees Jesus with lots of rules Thank you. Yeah, absolutely. It's good to have that presence.

But we also have no competition for the people that would be interested in a mainline voice. And we're still not being able to reach out in many of those communities. And we need to figure out what we're doing on that. Yeah, yeah. And I think part of it comes back to buildings.

You know, one of the things that I said is, and I remember saying this now, is I said, you know, have one of your grandkids come in and ask you what your church smells like. Because a lot of times our churches are so old and has old furniture and stuff. It smells like it's a nursing home. And a young family is not interested in that. Well, your comment about space was interesting. And when I got to Stratmore Hills in 2003, it was fascinating.

The space could hold about 140 capacity, but there was an energy in the room when 45 people were in attendance that was not true when there was 40 people in attendance. There was a tipping point. And it was interesting. And people said, what can I do to help this church grow? I said, my answer was be here, be here on Sunday, because there's a different energy in the room when you're present. And then, of course, it's incumbent upon me to take that energy as something and do something with that.

But we grew from 37 in 2003 to when I left, the attendance was 101. And that was just a real slow. Every year we grew by a couple, four or five. Then next year, grow four or five. But it was driven to some extent by the architecture in the room, the space, and then convincing people that that space needed a certain number of people in it. Gary Gettle, when he got the church going in Cheyenne, I think it was Frontier, when the church became Frontier, he was in a space that could hold 50 people.

And they were a new church start, and they got to a place where 50 couldn't fit in there. So they moved to a space that was a Seventh-day Adventist church they rented, and it had a space for 200. And so his attendance went from 50 to 80 in the new space, but there was no energy. The room was just too big for that attendance. The room lost its spiritual component. Am I talking to myself here, or does that make sense to you? No, 100%. When I got to Greeley, we were averaging 49.

The year before I got there, they averaged 49. The second year, we were at 105. So we more than doubled. And you'd think that'd be super exciting, but our sanctuary holds 600. And so even 100 in a sanctuary of 600, even our live streaming of the service, we really are trying to be very careful of our camera angles because it just looks like it's completely empty, even though we're seeing great growth in the church. I saw the Bishop Stone King's installation in Colorado Springs.

Of course, all I saw was about two pictures, but I was stunned at how few people were present for that. And of course, that's a sanctuary. I see 1200 people. So you could have 400 people in there. It looks like they just got gobbled up. Right. Yeah. And that, I think that's what happened in there. I think they had, you know, I think they had over 200 people in that, that sanctuary. And it looked like, yeah, it looked like a family pick, you know? Yeah.

Hardly anybody there. Yeah. Well, I appreciate you taking the time out of your busy day.

This is, you know, you and I've been on a dialogue for several weeks about this. And I know you've had some personal circumstances, haven't you? You had a parent who passed away in September. Do I have that right? Yeah, it's been a rough year for me. My church flooded. We had five feet of water in our basement. And that's what was the catalyst of us having the conversation about moving because we've flooded every year for five years.

And so we had to deal with that and then dealing with the saying goodbye to the building. And then my mom did pass away in September. And so I've had that as well. So it's been a rough summer for us. Yeah. Yeah. But we're good. Well, God bless you on that. I mean, there's times when we – there's too often people don't take into consideration some of the other factors that go on in somebody's life, and they just treat it as, what are you doing for me today?

And that's, of course, not really the way we should do that. I've been impressed with your work on the trustees. I've been very impressed. Thank you. You've been, when we've needed you from the finance side, I thought you were responsive and helpful and. You've done very good work. And the Board of Pension and Health Benefits has done very good work.

I guess I'd like to just, maybe I'm biased, but those two groups, those two sets of leaders, anyway, have been very mindful of the impact of cost of things on the local church. And they do everything they can to avoid, reduce it, do what they can to not break the local church because they're having to pay for insurance and health benefits and all of that kind of stuff. Yeah.

You know, and like so many churches seem to think that it's these leaders up in ivory towers in Denver that are, that are doing, uh, making all these decisions and telling us what we have to do. And they don't care about the local church, but finance. Yeah. Finance trustees and board of stewards are made up of pastors that are serving. Yeah. Board of Pension health benefits.

And then, and you're, and they're, they're made out of pastors and they're serving your churches and laity that are in your churches. And they're all trying to. They're trying to do a really difficult job. Yeah, trying to juggle 12 balls at one time. Yeah, it's challenging. Al, is there anything I didn't ask that you wish I had or you had hoped that I would ask? And you did, I forgot, I didn't do it?

No, no, I think we've covered it all. To be honest, I'm just really grateful that I can see the end of my journey with the trustees. And we'll see where the conference asks me to serve later on. But I can relate. I can relate. When it came time for me to step down off of the Council of Finance Administration, I loved the people, but I was ready for a little different set of challenges. Although this ministry we're doing right here is my new challenge.

I kept asking Zach Bichtel for ideas about how he was doing bearded theologians. And finally, I guess he went out of frustration. But finally, Zach said, Dennis, the best way to do this is get started. Yeah. And I would actually encourage all of our young clergy, push to get on finance or trustees or benefits. One of those, it'll, you'll make, yeah, it's an eye opener. You make, you make more contacts and it helps your career and it helps you understand

the larger picture as well. Yeah, I think they're helping understand the big picture. Al, thank you very much. Like I said, I'm impressed with your history and your ability and what you've done. And I just want to say on behalf of those that have been impressed with your work, thank you very much for the leadership you've provided these last eight years. Thank you. And thank you for the opportunity to talk a little bit more about selling our buildings. God bless you.

Everybody, this is Dennis Shaw. This has been Mindful Leader. And I just want to say thank you for having listened to this broadcast. Peace truly be with you. God bless. Bye-bye. Music.