VillagePastor

House Versus Church Building

Hopefully, our church will soon begin construction on a needed new sanctuary. And though there are lots of good reasons (facilitating for future growth, opportunities to diversify ministries, etc), it raises serious questions for others. While some might question the wisdom, others question the very legitimacy. In his Pagan Christianity, Frank Viola writes a chapter entitled “The Church Building: Inheriting the Edifice Complex.” The chapter is devoted to making the case that church buildings should have no place in contemporary Christianity. After all, Christians did not erect special buildings for worship for the first 300 years. Thanks to Constantine, the church went from house churches to holy cathedrals, and in so doing, it followed the path of the pagans in constructing temples to honor God. As Viola laments, “the story of the church building is the sad saga of Christianity borrowing from heathen culture and radically transforming the face of our faith.”  Viola closes with the challenge that believers come to realize we are neither biblical nor spiritual by supporting church buildings.

If what he says is true, than we certainly should stop all building plans and even sell the property we are worshipping on. Is there any substance here?  There is, for sure, something to be said for not building a faith around a building. All too many Christians have become more excited about brick and mortar than word and prayer. And all too often, ministry ends up serving buildings rather than buildings serving ministry.

But Viola is missing some important things. First of all, is there any real difference between the brick and mortar of a living room and the brick and mortar of a separate building set apart to do worship?  Does it make sense to say that one is organic in one and institutional in the other?  Aren’t they both organic and institution, organism and organization?  It seems like he is setting up false dichotomies. Furthermore, to suggest that the home is the only legitimate place to meet for church misses the fact that the early church first met in the synagogue. It was persecution that necessitated meeting in a home—not God declaring that the house is the only legitimate place to worship.

But there is something else that needs to be said, and it gets to the heart of our faith. God has made us both spiritual and material. As part of created matter, God declared it all--the trees, the ground, the flesh, the brick and mortar--good. God has chosen to use things like baptism and the Lord’s Supper as physical, earthy reminders of salvation, of Jesus’ work on the Cross.

To my amazement, he uses my physical body as a means to do his work, glorify His name. Can He not—does He not—use other material means to declare his glory?  Like the bread and the cup, can a building not also represent an earthly form of a heavenly reality? Can it not exhibit art in a profound way—even as the “most mathematical of art forms”, as Sittser puts it in his wonderful book, Water from a Deep Well??  Having lived in Europe for seven years, I have seen enough Cathedrals to realize that they were some of the greatest settings for people to come and know and experience God. Like ships, they have carried believers to salvation—from the outer narthex to the nave and to the sanctuary. They have served to remind people we are on this journey from world to kingdom. Like any church building should, they have functioned as a stage where the drama of salvation plays out.

While we are not building Notre Dame (it’s actually a concrete tilt up), I hope it will serve as a stage where the drama continues. And maybe in time, used for the glory of God, serving the ministry, God’s kingdom will be advanced far more effectively because it stands.

On the surface, there is a spiritual ring to the notion that we are to be liquid versus solid, organic versus material, house rather than building. But Sittser gives the needed clarity in describing our sacramental faith: “This is no abstract, ambiguous, sentimental, ephemeral kind of spirituality. It is body and blood, water, bread, and wine.”  And could we not add, in some cases, concrete?

LIVING ON THE EDGE AND IN THE CENTER

I’ve mentioned Barbara Brown Taylor’s LeavingChurch. On these long, dark, rainy nights, I have been rewarding the end of a long day with a re-read of her chapters. There’s something discomforting by the very cover, a cage door opened, and a bird set free. One gets the impression the wear and tear of ministry, the “omnipresence” of church culture, the confines of the institutional church began to slowly cage her in. As she puts it, “My context was so tightly focused that even my junk mail was Christian.” 

I have this haunting feeling that a lot of us in the church get to this place—where we become so immersed in our work that our contact with creation shrinks to the distance between our front door and the driveway; our exchange with those outside the church becomes confined to a transaction with a cashier at Safeway. Taylor came to a place of “compassion fatigue,” leading to a move from the staff of a large urban church to a small rural church. But eventually, it led her all of the way into the wilderness. She found that in order to keep her faith she had to leave her role as a pastor, her “institutional power,” as she puts it, her role of standing up every week in special clothes and talking while people quietly listen.

In the wilderness, where the collar came off, she began to see how her ministry role had “cut into her soul.” Listen to the way she puts it: “I needed the soul’s wisdom to do my work. I needed its compassion. But I had too often failed to set it loose in its own pasture at night, where it could kick its heels and roll in the dirt. I had kept my soul so hitched to the plow that it stood between the traces even after the harness was off, oiled, and hung on the wall.” But now, the harness is off.

God, I love good writing. But some of the best writing also makes me squirm in my bed. Out from the demands and expectations of ministry, she found herself simply another of God’s beggars. Out away from the work, she discovered that God has both a center and an edge—and that each is necessary for the soul. That sometimes you have to step out, “where the lights from the sanctuary no longer pierce the darkness.”  Out unto the brink, the wilderness, where you discover needed things about yourself, needed things about the Spirit. Jesus occasionally lived out on the edge, where the Spirit wasn’t always so safe, thrusting Him into the wilderness to face His hunger, face the adversary, and experience the Father’s love.

Somehow this resonates with me, not because I am contemplating leaving ministry. I love ministry. I just want to be careful that the role does not so cut into my soul that my interior becomes defined by its ruts. That I don’t get so attached to the pastoral identity given me that I would not know how to make up one of my own. My grandfather was a pastor, and its role so defined him that I never saw him without a tie—ever. I don’t remember him as anything else but clergy.

I don’t want to close myself in the center, where it is safe, and get so caught up in ministry that I start speaking Christianize, so immersed I am scared of ever setting foot into the wilderness—and would not know what to do if God thrusts me there (which He has been known to do).

Yesterday I met with an old friend I had not seen in years. In the comforts of my seminary study, surrounded by books, we reminisced on our earlier times in the literal wilderness, surrounded by the wild. Hiking the Jefferson Wilderness in the summer, snow camping on a frozen TrilliumLakein the winter, biking trails that burned our lungs. But we’re not so inclined to go there anymore. I’m inclined to stay closer to the center. Taylor urges me to take care to live in both worlds, both literal and metaphoric.