Reservoir Church’s Mortgage Burn Celebration

December 16, 2024

This fall, on a crisp, sunny Sunday morning in October, members of the Reservoir community gathered around a fire pit we’d set up in our parking lot for a mortgage-burning party. 

For the first time in twenty-one years, our church was free of debt. We are no longer directing large monthly payments toward our bank. Instead, we’ll use those funds on programs for community well-being and the sustainability of the church. We rejoiced that this is a church with an abundant future.

We personalized the moment of celebration, thinking of prayers of gratitude for ways we believe God has helped our church thrive or that God has helped us to thrive financially. We are grateful for when we have more than enough for our needs and to be generous to others. We wrote those prayers of gratitude on little slips of paper that we added to the fire.

We were honest about the complexity of the moment. Our church is now debt-free, but most of us are not. We thought of our sadness, anger, fear, and worries connected to our debts and our financial struggles. We turned these into prayers too. We wrote our prayers of lament for our financial lives on slips of paper and we added these to the fire too.

As we burned the final statements of our debt, we marked the close of a season defined by risk and obligation and stepped into a new chapter filled with freedom and abundance in the life of the church.

We touched the ground or the bricks or some other part of the property and acknowledged that while we technically now own this property free and clear, we know it doesn’t really belong to us. Our spiritual ancestors who came before us built this property and funded its purchase by our church. We honor them. To our indigenous ancestors who first resided on this land and hold an enduring claim to it, we seek to honor them with respect and gratitude. We also believe that God is the only true owner of this land. So we pledged by faith that we will not act as owners of this property but as stewards, taking care of this church for ourselves and for the broader community and for the generations to come.

It was a holy and beautiful day for us. 

This was all made possible by Reservoir Church’s founding generation, the people who founded our church in the 1990s to be a place where longtime churchgoers and people who’d never gone to church or who had given up on church could discover the love of God, the gift of community, and the joy of living together. 

This was also made possible by the early generations of the church who by faith and through generosity raised over four million dollars to purchase and renovate the property back in 2003-2004.

This day was made possible by wise Board members, Board treasurers, advisors, and the generous households who pledged and gave over $1.4 million to our 25th-anniversary capital campaign in 2023-2024.

Reservoir Church now has funds and cash flow to invest in our property’s sustainable future. We have a team of designers and engineers working on a ten-year maintenance and improvement plan for our sanctuary, including structural safety, repairs, better environmental impact, and more hospitable lobby and bathroom areas. 

Reservoir is also preparing to launch a spiritual and mental wellness initiative in 2025, to expand the impact of our Beloved Community Fund, and to begin investments in like-minded Christian ministries we can partner with and support and learn from more deeply. We are so grateful for this freedom and opportunity. 

Days like this remind us too that big projects that take a long time really can come to completion. Big dreams really can come true. When we trust in an abundant God and show up in solidarity together, we can see big things into being that none of us could do alone.