Rev. Hannah Lovaglio

If someone watched your congregation for a year, what would they conclude matters most?

I’ve long wanted one of those signs to hang in our family’s kitchen that reads: In this house, we… *(insert inspiring values and rules)*.

The Lovaglios might say, in this house, we stop to dance, laugh often, wash our hands, keep the dog’s water bowl full, listen then speak, grow in grace, take responsibility, practice kindness, live generously.

Or better still, we could borrow the sign outside our children’s school:

Though I’ve added them to my Etsy cart many times, I’ve never followed through on the purchase. I daydreamed once about my grown children in therapy, confiding about the hypocrisy of the sign that hung in the kitchen, and how the cognitive dissonance between what we espoused and what we lived had been enough to send them to a professional.

Once that daydream got in my head, all hope of hanging an inspirational sign in the kitchen dissipated.

Oh well.

But what about churches?

Churches love putting our values on things. We put them on websites and strategic plans, brochures and banners. We write mission statements and vision statements and carefully chosen lists of core values. We might say that we value welcome, community, justice, worship, compassion, belonging, discipleship and service.

And we mean them. We put a lot of time, energy, conversation and resources into naming our values.

Still, I wonder whether the most revealing list of a congregation’s values is the one we never actually write down.

If someone knew nothing about our church and spent a year watching us, what would they conclude we value?

Where do we spend our time? Whose voices do we listen to? Who gets welcomed through the doors, and who discovers that the welcome was really meant for someone else? What do we protect when resources are tight? What are we willing to change? What do we make room for? Where do our people volunteer? What stories do we tell again and again?

And, inevitably: how do we use our money?

That last question can make us uncomfortable, especially in church. Stewardship and generosity can be difficult subjects to talk about. We have inherited all sorts of anxiety about talking about money and faith in the same sentence. But our financial choices are already telling stories about what matters to us.

This is true personally. If I say that I value community, but never make time for other people, there is a gap worth noticing. If I value care for creation, my habits might slowly begin to reflect that. If I believe that in the kingdom of God, no child goes hungry, but I don’t contribute anything to the community food drive, I’ve missed a chance to make my prayers real. If I believe that children deserve places where they know themselves to be loved, safe, and celebrated, I can give my time and resources to creating those places.

Generosity is one way we close the distance between the values we espouse and the lives we actually live.

The same is true for congregations.

A church that says children matter makes room in its budget, its building, and its worship for children. A church that values its neighbourhood opens its doors and pays attention to what is happening beyond them. A church committed to compassion keeps resources readily available for the person who needs help on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon. A church that values beautiful worship supports musicians and ministers and all the people whose work makes gathering possible. A church that believes in the human dignity of all invests in a thousand small acts of hospitality through which strangers come to know they belong.

And none of those things happens because we put the right words on a sign.

They happen because people give.

They give money, certainly. They also give time and attention, skills and creativity, goodwill and gentleness, and food and rides and prayers. They give Sunday mornings and Tuesday evenings. They give what they have because somewhere along the way they have decided: this matters to me.

Perhaps that is one way to think about generosity: not primarily as an obligation to an institution, but as the practice of putting our resources behind the things we say we value.

For people of faith, there is gratitude lies underneath the practice. We give because we have received: life and love, grace and belonging, daily bread and people with whom to share it. Generosity becomes our way of saying thank you to God with our lives.

And when we give through a congregation, something particularly interesting happens. My values meet yours, and something grows between us that none of us could create alone. My desire for children to grow up surrounded by grace joins your commitment to music, and someone else’s passion for justice, and another’s concern for the lonely, and another’s love for the neighbourhood, and still another’s hope that there will be a faithful community here for generations to come.

Our individual acts of generosity and care become a shared life.

And that’s where we find the congregation’s true values. Not the words on the “What We Believe” website tab, but the commitments we have agreed to practice together. What surfaces is beautiful.

In this church, we share conversation over good coffee; pull out high chairs for the youngest among us; find service dogs tucked under pews; sing alleluias graveside; stock the pantry with healthy food and snacks available to anyone, anytime; glean the neighbor’s apple orchard and bake apple crisps for shut-ins; post thank-you cards weekly; pen lyrical limericks for milestone moments; hand-stitch backpack blessing badges; knit prayers into shawls; offer coffee hour chess lessons and fresh-baked bread at communion; open the doors for quiet moments of prayer; memorialize those lost and promise those born; glimpse resurrection, daily.

Of course, no family lives up to the sign in the kitchen every day, or even most days. And no congregation perfectly embodies its mission statement. There will always be some distance between who we say we are and who we manage to be.

Perhaps the answer, though, isn’t to leave the wall blank.

Perhaps it is to name what matters anyway, and then, together, to keep practicing our way toward it.

To keep choosing kindness. To keep making room. To keep showing grace. To take responsibility for one another. To keep giving our time, our attention, our resources, our very selves.

Until, little by little, the values we proclaim become the life we share.