On Unused

I went to EMPAC today to get a ticket for a show tomorrow. For those of you tuning in not on the RPI campus, EMPAC is the 220 million dollar building that is very cool and very unused. They tell us that they do research there, but then again, the RPI student union has to pay RPI for ice time for RPI's Div1 hocky team on RPI's own ice.

But here's the deal. The northern wall of EMPAC is 7 stories of glass showing a really cool staircase that goes from the bottom of the building to the top. The top is where the Box Office is, where you get tickets.
Except the box office is really just a wrap-around stainless steel desk.
And there's only one guy working it.
Empac is 7 stories of about 22,000 square feet.
You can walk around in the building all day, and unless there's a show going on, the only person that you'll ever see is that box office guy, staring at his iMac indefinitely.

EMPAC has employees. I'm going to guess maybe 10 or so full time workers.
They have really nice offices in the back. They're the guys that are in charge of programming, getting artists into the place, administrative and creative work.
But you walk inside the building, and there's simply an overwhelming sense of Space. Like you're surrounded by open-ness, you can look out the enormous window at Troy, everything is blue slate, glass, and stainless steel.

But it feels abandoned. Because there are no people in it that aren't shut away behind their locked suites in their nice offices.

I feel like the church has a lot of similarities to this.
Jesus paid much more than 220 million dollars for the church. He died. The guys that wrote the New Testament, most of them died for the church. Centuries of Saints died for the church.
But what are we doing with it?
Paying a single person to sit in the entree way waiting for a few sparse people to come buy tickets? Locking our pastors away in offices while we have theaters and auditoriums full of unused space? (think figuratively, not literally)

The Church is the greatest organization on the planet. We could at least do more than EMPAC with the resources we've been given.