The Sistine Chapel inspires wonder, beauty, and praise to tens of thousands of pilgrims each year.  Michelangelo, masterfully relates a mosaic of biblical stories evoking the grandeur of God and the remarkable, God-given ability to create given to the pinnacle of creation, woman and man.   Still, centuries later, people flock to the Vatican City to look up and to behold something of the mystery that is the relationship between the divine and humanity.

Julius II, by no means a saint, commissioned Michelangelo to paint the chapel in the early 1500’s.^[1]It was partially in response to Julius II’s military campaigns and his sale of indulgences that Martin Luther famously nailed his 95 Theses to the door at Wittenberg.  The Medieval church, for all of its monumental shortcomings, widely patronized great artistic works ranging from paintings, to sculptures, to architecture.  The power players who commissioned these works, from popes like Julius II to the famous Medici family of Florence may have had mixed motivations for why they funded these artists and their projects but the reality is, because of their willingness to make something beautiful, something masterful, the world has been enriched.  Because of the audacious vision of patron and artist alike, their stories are still being told and the work that they partnered to create still leaves our world in awe.

The church for most of Western history was the primary benefactor of beauty.  As a church planter, one of my most challenging initial tasks is to fund the vision that God has given me.  Undertaking this work, I have been blessed to reconnect with so many people who have had a profound impact on my life.  I have been overwhelmed with the graciousness shown to me, the encouragement, the belief expressed in things like money and prayers.  As I’m knee-deep in this all-encompassing reality, I have begun to see the task differently.  I am sincerely not trying to get people to pay my bills, I am inviting them into the creative artistry of our creative God. If anything, the radical generosity and belief shown in me makes me work so much harder and makes me so much more conscience of stewarding these gifts well. Like David famously, saw the figure of his David statue in the stone long before he liberated him from his rocky prison, I see the beauty and transformation in the lives of individuals whose names I may not even know yet.  I see not inviting people to pay for a build but to patron a community, like the Sistine chapel, a mosaic of stories, the convergence of heaven and earth, the mystery of God embraced anew.   In short, we are not funding a church, we are funding a work of art, crafted by the Spirit of God.

The Sistine chapel will evoke something of the grandeur of God in humanity as long as it remains.  If we think the great works of art of our world are beautiful, and they are, think about the glory of a human soul, renewed and restored by the glory of God that we will able to see fully in eternity.^[2]C. S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce captures exactly this concept so simply and yet so brilliantly.  When we as the church, fund new churches, we are funding the artwork of the master craftsman (Eph. 2v10).  We are investing our resources in the Spirit of God to inhabit local spaces and to transform lives.  When God changes a life through our local churches, he builds monuments that will stand for all of eternity.   Funding churches is patronizing the architect of our souls to build a temple, a luminescent structure for all of eternity, of living stones.^[3]1 Peter 2v5.