Engineering in the Kingdom

Often I feel as though my life is filled with little, unresolved paradoxes that somehow God is able to work around. Most of you know I work for Amber's father as a mechanical engineer. It's a great job and our company, which was just Bob and I a few months ago, has doubled in size. We primarily design mechanical and plumbing systems for commercial buildings and large homes. Now, when I mean large, I really mean large. We typically don't do anything under 10,000 square feet and usually it's closer to 15 or 20. The sick thing is that most of these homes are people's "winter residences" in Palm Beach or Jupiter Island. They may be lived in only a few months out of the year. The opulence and excess that is associated with these homes often gives me pause. It feels as though I'm helping to perpetuate a disease - a sickness of greed and wastefulness. But the wealthy have built palaces for a long, long time, and often at the expense of and causing oppression to the underprivileged around them. At least in this case, many, many people are getting paid when these houses are built. In one case, just the professional fees alone for the job (architectural and engineering) totaled close to a million dollars. The construction guys aren't doing too bad either. So, there are ways to resolve the conflict sometimes.

But another area of the business cuts closer to home. One of the architects we work for does many projects for churches in the area. Most of them are fairly average church buildings. Others are not. This week we just finished a design for this architect for a remodel of a local megachurch's secondary building. This building used to be their main gathering place, but now they have a much larger auditorium across the street. Anyway, this "smaller" building seats 600 people and has two floors of offices and meeting rooms. There are now plans in the works for this same church to build another auditorium and rec center for their youth that will seat 1000 people. Also, the church has started a satellite campus about 20 miles away and has bought a vacated Target building to become another auditorium. Secondly, last week we got another job for a megachurch north of here that is building a 42,000 square foot preschool with a huge indoor playground complete with a merry-go-round. Dude!

What is difficult for me is not that I think building these buildings is inherently evil or is being wasteful for the churches who are building them. As far as I know, these churches are not struggling financially. They have big donors and big bank accounts. Mostly I just think about it as "more work". Just another engineering challenge. What I struggle with more is the philosophy that develops quickly around church building projects such as these. I lived this in Gainesville when the church was in the process of buying a large, older Methodist church building. The philosophy becomes, "Imagine all that we can do when this building is finished." It's a subtle shift, but a shift nonetheless. I was once a church leader who got stars in his eyes thinking of the prospects for ministry this "building" would provide. But the harsh reality is, ministry happens with people and requires people who are engaged in a process with God. You can recruit the hell out of a group to fill a building and make it active, but activity and ministry are two different things.

So as I'm designing these systems I keep going back to the small, the organic, the insignificant. Don't take this as just another indictment of the megachurch - that's been overdone. God bless these people. I really pray that the Spirit continue to lead these groups of people and that Jesus would become real in their midst. In my neck of the woods, however, there is a longing to follow my education as an industrial engineer: Work smarter, not harder. Stay lean and mean. Reduce your overhead. Put a premium on efficiency and quality. Your system is perfectly designed to get the results you are now getting. Innovate. Create. Explore. Let production come from good process, good systems, good leadership, flat structures, teamwork, and happy, healthy people.

If church follows the pattern it has for the past 30-40 years, look at what the best businesses and leadership gurus are saying right now and then look for churches to start following those patterns in another 5-10 years. What I think you'll see is churches will begin to shrink in size, become much less top-heavy, function will dominate form, structures will be created around small groups of people with similar passions that will self-rule, and these groups will interrelate with other groups outside their organization freely and without restriction. Buildings will become much smaller and much less focused on assembly of large groups. Budgets will shift from financing the dreams of the few to financing the dreams and action of the many. Technology will play a role as information and ideas freely flow from one network to another. Learning will become much more of a fluid process and will happen just-in-time, i.e., the right resources will be delivered to the right person at the right time. All of this will shape a people primarily motivated by a much more holistic understanding of God and the gospel who see the kingdom at work in the past, present, and future.

You might say, "I just don't see it Mike. There's too much at stake. People love power and success too much." That's true, but it's not hard to look around and see small, insignificant examples of this beginning to happen. The number of people I know who have this dream in their heart is growing rapidly. And many of them are the kind of people who are capable and motivated to take this dream into its next steps. Also, I would argue that the problem is not always people loving success too much, it's that they are just doing the best they know how with what they have. You can't blame people for doing that, but you can begin to shape imaginations towards a new reality. In this case, that is probably going to happen one person at a time.

So this dream will continue to be juxtaposed with blueprints of auditoriums and giant preschools. I'm okay with the paradox (as long as it keeps being profitable - ha ha). But I'm also aware of all the individuals around me and across the web who are finding the kingdom in unusual (and mostly unnoticed) places.

Well, the kids are running around making it difficult to wrap this up. Peace to you all.