Paradigm is hosted by Maple Leaf Church, where Shawn (our Lead Pastor) is on staff. Maple Leaf is an extremely elderly (as in wrinkles, not leadership models) church that has lost a bunch of people in the past 10-20 years (they’ve gone from 300 people to around 15 regulars attendees and a bunch of shut-ins). Some of the congregation really enjoys being such a small church and wants it to stay that way (they like that everyone is either playing an instrument or on the church council… it’s amazing how many committees and how much bureaucracy you can cram into a church of 15 people…), while others are intent on re-growing the church (which I applaud so long as the goal is quality – a healthy community – first and quantity second).
Everyone on the Paradigm staff helps out with Maple Leaf – contributing to the Sunday service and doing some admin work for them during the week. It seems like a good way of thanking them for hosting Paradigm. And as we’re getting to know the congregation, one of the things we’re really trying to communicate with them is the importance of connecting their facility with the needs of the community.
The building is really great from the outside – a large classic red brick structure in a residential area, but within a couple blocks of two main streets. While the outside of the building could use a good pressure-wash, it is in mostly good shape. Inside the building, however, is a monument to untapped potential. Circa-1988 carpets, with their array of coffee stains, cover the gorgeous hardwood floors. Soiled and/or broken couches (again, circa-1988) sit in nearly every room in the building. We won’t even bother explaining some of the “art” on the walls.
Just know that this is as good an example of the Broken Windows Theory (as articulated in Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point) as a church could ever be. The vibe of mediocrity is thick in that place. It’s suffocating, really. Most of the people in this tiny congregation have been in the church for 30 years (for some of them it’s more like 60 years), and I’m beginning to think that seeing their community take such a hit in momentum and attendance has drained their imagination, and now they can’t see past the present mediocrity (yet they can’t understand why the young families in the surrounding neighborhood don’t want to spend their Sunday mornings gawking at the funeral decor and muttering along as a dozen strangers drone through a bunch of hymns that seem really irrelevant and out of touch).

Those of us from Paradigm who help out with Maple Leaf are trying everything we can to help them connect the potential of their building to the needs of the neighborhood. The houses in the neighborhood are being rented or bought by young families, professionals, and people who walk their dogs religiously. One particular coffeeshop a few blocks from the church has a make-shift play area where toddler-hand-holding and stroller-pushing parents (not just moms… I guess Seattle’s notorious pastor hasn’t condemned all of those “evil” stay-at-home dads yet…) can deposit their children so that kids and adults alike can do some mingling through the morning and afternoon. The only thing is that this play area is around five square-feet and usually contains at least eight kids (better pull out that hand sanitizer…).
Let’s just say it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what could be done with Maple Leaf’s giant finished basement and the three or four adjacent children’s rooms (which, ironically, are the most decked-out part of this building – one room has a nature theme with a giant fake tree; another room has a space-age theme with a mini-theatre; if I was a kid I would love it down there).
But who wants to remodel a basement when we can just pass out tracts or write something pithy on our church sign? What does having people over to our place during the week have to do with ministry?
There are a lot of changes this congregation is going to need to make over the next several weeks and months. But there’s something potentially constructive about hitting rock-bottom – sometimes it takes reaching the floor to receive a wake-up call – and I don’t know how much longer this congregation can afford to heat their building if they’re not growing. It would be so disheartening if they had to give up their worship space just because, when things got rough, they fell back on outdated methodology rather than locating the pulse of their changing neighborhood.
With no tangible or rational evidence to support this claim, something in me believes they’re going to figure it out and begin to live missionally and incarnationally in their neighborhood, and the Castle to Untapped Potential will begin to reflect that vibrant locality.
As an exercise in hopeful anticipation, and for the sake of addressing at least one element of Maple Leaf’s “Broken Windows,” Shawn and I are trying to re-brand Maple Leaf, in terms of imagery (and pretty much every respect). Shawn worked with a design company a few months ago on some loose ideas and I recently did some editing to refine those concepts. What we really want to communicate visually is that Maple Leaf is a neighborhood church and a multi-generational church. (These are prescriptions more than descriptions, but if Maple Leaf is going to survive, they’ll need some of these young families in the neighborhood to join their community. And even up until that happens, it is this neighborhood full of young families whom Maple Leaf should be serving.)
Tangible change has to start somewhere, so why not start with the central image for all of Maple Leaf’s materials? Over the next few weeks we’ll try to get this new image circulating throughout the church community. Our hope is that it connect them with the church’s history while helping them to see forward into a new chapter of community life, and will inspire them to navigate through this next bend in the road with imagination and optimism.
How people respond to this new image – whether it becomes a catalyst for further changes and widening imagination – will determine whether it was powerful and purposeful. At the very least, to whatever extent this image will be seen from the building’s exterior, we’re making the neighborhood just a bit more charming.
