Our name
Why “Wood, Hay, Stubble”?
A foundation usually names itself after a family, a place, or a virtue. We named ourselves after three things that burn.
Writing to the church at Corinth, the Apostle Paul describes builders working on a foundation that has already been laid, which is Jesus Christ. Some build with gold, silver, and precious stones. Others build with wood, hay, and straw. The materials look much the same while the building is going up. The difference only appears when the fire comes.
“If anyone builds on this foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw — each one’s work will become manifest, for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed by fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done.”
1 Corinthians 3:12–13
We chose the three words that burn.
It would have been easy to take the other half of the verse. Gold, Silver & Precious Stone is the name a foundation gives itself when it is confident of its own significance — and it would have looked considerably better on a letterhead.
We took the perishable materials on purpose, as a standing correction. Most of what any of us builds is wood, hay, and stubble. It is well-meant, it is busy, it may even be admired, and it will not survive the fire. That is not a comfortable thing to name yourself after, which is precisely the point of doing it.
The name puts a question to our own work every time we use it. Is this the kind of thing that lasts? Would it still matter if no one recorded that we had done it? A foundation is unusually well positioned to build impressive and perishable things — to fund what photographs well, to prefer the visible over the durable, to mistake activity for fruit.
What we believe does last.
Three things, and the list is short on purpose: the gospel preached, the church strengthened, and the people in whom that work takes root and outlives everyone who funded it.
None of the three produces a satisfying annual report. A congregation held together through a difficult decade, a school that kept a good teacher, a family that stayed on the field in Italy one more year — these are not achievements a foundation can take credit for, and they resist being counted. They are also, we think, the only part of the work that will still be standing.
So the name is not humility for its own sake. It is a working instruction. Build the things that outlast us, and be content not to see how it turns out.