Report from the Tabernacle Building Committee

            I’ll admit it.  I was a day behind on my readings.  (It happens to me often.)  So, this morning I read Exodus 25-29.  The topics included instructions for the tabernacle and its furnishings—the ark of the covenant, the table of the presence, the lampstand, the altar—and the consecration of Aaron and his sons.

            Whenever I read this section of Exodus, I’m always struck by the seeming excess of the tabernacle.  I mean, here are a people who have only recently escaped from slavery.  They have a land to take over and homes to establish and new lives to get up and running.  Now granted they had plundered the Egyptians (Ex. 12:35), but still—ever heard of a rainy day fund?  Last time I looked, gold was selling for over $1,000 an ounce, and their lampstand alone was 75 pounds.  I’m no math major but that works out to a $1 million dollar lampstand.  I know whole church building that didn’t cost that much.

            That raises for me two stewardship kinds of questions.  The first is about our own generosity.  Granted that there were a lot of Israelites, they were still very generous for their sanctuary and its accoutrements.  In the contemporary church we would have had to have had an in-depth study and a long capital campaign to raise pledges for that amount, much less everything up front.  God’s expectations (and later Israel’s generosity) raise the bar for measuring our own generosity.

            The second question is related.  It seems to me that most people couldn’t see their way clear to approving such an expensive building project.  Can’t you just hear the voters’ meeting?  “Why is there a $1 million dollar golden lampstand on this spec sheet?  If we made it out of bronze it would be a fraction of the cost and twice as durable.”  I would come down to a 51-49 vote.  Maybe I’m wrong but it seems to me that the contemporary church is reluctant to honor God with buildings like that.  I wonder why?

            (To muddy the water even further, I also find myself thinking that perhaps the church’s buildings are part of a different problem:  I find myself wondering if we’re so concerned with our buildings that we don’t really engage in God’s mission.  Believe it or not, the two issues are related because they’re about how we honor God.  In the first case, do we give Him our best; in the second case, do we love our buildings more than the mission He has set us to?  If we’re really committed, there ought to be resources enough for both!)