"The Investment"

"In his poem 'The Investment,' Robert Frost sketches a quaint scene of people trying to escape the reality of the hardscrabble life of potato farming. Depending on which way you look at the poem, it is either a testament to human folly or a triumph of the human spirit. Set in a potato field, it concerns a community of struggling farmers, 'where they speak of life as staying' (instead of living). Life is tough. One family has reacted against their lot and defied the landscape of endless bleak, brown hills by painting their old house brightly and installing the luxury of a piano. It's not difficult to picture this freshly painted shack in the fields of ploughed hills. In this otherwise barren, silent vista you can almost hear the honky-tonk sounds of a parlor piano.

"Out in the fields, a farmer, freezing as he digs in the cold soil, hears the music and looks back to the brightly colored home. He wonders to himself who lives there and why they waste their money on indulgences like a piano and new paint ('Was it some money suddenly come into?/Or some extravagance young love had been to?') But it is his third possible explanation that is left ringing in our ears as the poem ends:

Or old love on an impulse not to care -
Not to sink under being man and wife,
But get some color and music out of life.

"The metaphor of an old couple surrounded by desolate potato fields, splashing their home with color and filling their parlor with music is a powerful one. Either it represents sheer foolhardiness, a desperate denial of the facts of life - wastefulness in the face of great need - or it celebrates life and joy against the debilitation forces of stagnation and hunger. A man and woman refuse to sink under the forces that reduce them to being just a man and wife struggling to survive.

'For us it is a great metaphor of the church. And as with all of Robert Frost's best work, the poem (and the metaphor) speaks in several ways. First, the church might accurately be seen as a painted-over, old dilapidated shack in the middle of barren fields. Its once grand and powerful splendor now faded, it looks silly in the barrenness and faithlessness that surrounds it. Its color an music seem wasteful, anachronistic, and even obstinate in the face of a world of fading dreams. We can't reapply the same colors or play our pianos a little louder. Rather the house needs a complete overhaul.

"But on the other hand, the metaphor works as a symbol of what the church might become. As Robert Frost says of the farmer in the field:

Out in the ploughed ground in the cold a digger,
Among the unearthed potatoes standing still,
Was counting winter dinners, one a hill,
With half an ear to the piano's vigor

"The farmer's chief concern is survival. He's counting winter dinners while giving half an ear to the enthusiastic playing. In the midst of the cold, brown plots a house full of color and music that rages against the prevailing culture of sandness and uncertainty is just what the church should be.

"We recently saw the covor of a book about reinventing the church that's an icon of just what we think is wrong with the post-Christendom church. It depicts a classic church building, replete with a tall steeple, long stained glass windows, and a white picket fence. Leaning over the building from behind is a giant man in a white, long-sleeved shirt and tie (we think he's meant to be a minister - very clean cut) and a gigantic wrench in his hand. He is tightening a huge bolt on the front of the steeple. When we talk about reinventing the church, too many people assume it's as simple as tightening a bolt here, oiling a hinge there, slapping on a new coat of paint. But we are proposing a monumental change to the way we think about being and doing church.

"All the tinkering with the existing model of church that's going on will not save the day. Simply making minor adjustments like replacing pews with more comfortable seating, or singing contemporary pop songs instead of hymns will not reverse the fundamental decline in the fortunes of the Western chruch. If you think of the church as a car, we cannot simply take it in for service. We need a whole new model. Or think of a chruch as a VCR. If you have newer DVDs, you can't play them on your old VCR - you need an entirely different device."

from The Shaping of Things to Come by Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch