Are We Prepared For Another Great Depression?

Do we really think something like this, or worse, couldn't
happen again?

It's not unusual for church agencies and institutions to develop long-range plans for their future, based on optimistic assumptions about growth and prosperity in US and world economies. But I know of none that have come up with a clear plan for responding to an event like the 1929 stock market crash.

My parents experienced the full impact of that disaster in their personal lives all during the 30's, while at the same time dealing with years of crop failure due to drought conditions in northeast Oklahoma's Nowata County, where I was born. Yet I've heard my father repeatedly say that in some ways those were among the best years of their life, as the church community of which my parents were a part made extraordinary sacrifices to enable everyone to survive. An article one of my cousins wrote about the group's struggle was entitled "The Lean Years of Prosperity."

Meanwhile, most Mennonite church agencies, including Hesston, Goshen and Eastern Mennonite Colleges, managed to survive, by staff members taking pay cuts and everyone pitching in to do everything necessary to keep their institutions afloat.

Years ago the faculty of Eastern Mennonite High School, with whom I served as a half-time teacher, went through a brain-storming exercise as a part of an annual faculty conference to come up with a plan for surviving a severe economic downturn, just in case. Some ideas I recall the group coming up with were each sharing in steep pay reductions, going to a four-day school week and with longer school days to reduce travel and overhead costs, along with closing school during the coldest and hottest months of the year to save on energy costs.

Most felt it was a fruitful exercise. Every now and then it may do us all good to think of how scaling back on the benefits we've come to expect for ourselves and our congregations and church institutions could be done in the most equatable ways possible. And maybe in ways that would actually result in blessing for all concerned.

I again thought about this recently as I reread the story of Egypt's seven years of plenty in the book of Exodus, followed by seven years of severe famine and want.

Today we're facing a pandemic that may well affect us in completely unanticipated ways, causing us to enter a season of similar deprivation and potential hardship for which we are ill prepared.