A Theology of Church Buildings

My recent experience serving a church in the midst of a building program has given me opportunity to think about God's perspective on buildings.  Institutional church life is influenced by church buildings more than we often realize.  Many or most church meetings have little or nothing to do with anything but the construction, care, and use of buildings.  And yet, we rarely address what scripture and the teachings of our faith might tell us about how a Christian community should approach buildings.

NT Wright is very helpful here.  In his Simply Christian, he describes how the Tabernacle and then the Temple served the function of being the place where God's space and human space converged.  The Temple was a physical testimony to God's immanence.  It was a place where people could physically go to experience the reality that God is not removed from us but that heaven and earth interlock and crash in upon each other.  The planning, building, protecting, renovating, mourning, and rebuilding of the Temple take up an extraordinary amount of the Hebrew Bible's attention.

Jesus claims that he is the Temple--his very body.  Wherever Jesus is, the Kingdom of God draws near.  Heaven and earth interlock and intersect wherever Jesus is.

Therefore, there is no need of a Temple after Jesus.  After Jesus ascends, the New Testament (in its various strains, voices, and witnesses) agrees that the people of God are the place where Jesus is to be found and where heaven and earth intersect.

For example, the Book of Hebrews uses Temple language in very Platonic terms, saying the the earthly temple was always only a shadow of the heavenly temple anyway, that Jesus provides a perfect temple in himself, that believers must remain always faithful to the community of faith because it is there where we discover the living temple of Christ as we gather together.

1 Peter claims very explicitly that we are a living/spiritual/windy house (oikos pneumatikos), that each and every believer is a living stone that makes the true house of God, that Jesus is the cornerstone that holds us all together and fits us to each other.

Paul says the same thing in 1 Corinthians--We are the temple of the Holy Spirit.  We normally think this means that each of us has the Spirit within us, which is true, but beside Paul's point.  He argues that the physical bodies of the physical community collectively constitute the physical presence of Christ wherever we gather, so whatever any one of us does in the body--whether it be an act of agape or an act of sin--affects the whole body and Christ himself.

Early Christians had no buildings.  The New Testament talks very often of the people gathering to pray, share meals, remember the Lord, reflect on scripture, etc.  Clearly, this happened in homes for the first century (at the very least) of the Church's life.  Each and every Christian gathering in the New Testament is either constituted of Christians participating in Jewish worship in a Temple or synagogue or gathering among themselves in homes.  There are no archeological remains of any building constructed for the purpose of Christian worship before the house church of Duro-Europos (ca. 235 AD).

In recent years, many Christian leaders and thinkers have argued (aided by the disastrous results of church overbuilding and borrowing just before the 2008 financial collapse) that churches should do all they can to get out of the building business entirely.  They have argued that the future of church life will be found in interconnected home cell groups, or gatherings of Christians in public spaces.  There have been many successful experiments with this model as well as many disasters.  Several coastal UMC congregations have successfully launched "Worship on the Water" services (Gulf Breeze, Woodlawn in PCB, Perdido's Florabama site).  These services have attracted huge crowds and many new believers, proved to be extraordinarily cost efficient, and allowed ministry energy to be focused on discipleship rather than administrative matters.

At the same time, we have yet to see one of these beach services flourish without the support of a large, stable, traditional bricks-and-mortar congregation.  A building provides a center and a gathering place for the people of God.  A house does not make a family, but it is very difficult for a family to stay deeply connected without centers of family life such as dinner tables, living rooms, and walls to hold family portraits.  Congregations that meet in rented spaces may be dynamic and charismatic (in the non-Pentecostal sense), but they also lack roots and tend to be built around the personality of preacher.  Perhaps this is a shakier idolatry--buildings last longer than preachers and are less given to failure.  The "no-church-buildings-in-the-future" crowd sometimes seems more in love with making futuristic predictions and seeming smarter than the rest of us than getting busy doing God's work in the world through whatever means necessary (buildings or no buildings).

Theologically speaking, church buildings must always be understood as tools for a greater purpose and never as an end in themselves.  At the point that the building becomes the goal and the people become the means to build or maintain the physical space, a destructive idolatry has taken over that will cause the true and living Church of God expressed among a body of believers to begin to die.  This is why "build it and they will come" never works.  It's why churches that build big, expensive buildings without clarity of the missional purposes of those buildings find themselves hamstrung both programmatically and financially.  It's why a church that limits the use of facilities in order to protect the facility from harm or theft or to save money will quickly find the facility falling into disrepair with no money to fix it up--God is not in the business of maintaining our idols.  God pays the invoice when he's placed an order, but he will not pay up if he didn't order it.  God does not pay for monuments.  When we use every resource to build the living Church and accomplish what he intended to be done through the buildings, he has a remarkable way of getting them paid for.

Whether congregations are wrestling with whether to build, or what to build, or how to use existing buildings, the question must always be an afterthought of the missional purpose and call of the collective people of God.  The question of the future and call of a congregation is never about a building.  It's always about a living community drawing the world to itself and spreading the love of God in tangible ways to the world around it.  Buildings may or may not be helpful to that call, and the building of the buildings themselves is almost always is a distraction from the mission, just as it's impossible to dig a hole at the same time you're at the hardware store shopping for a shovel.  Buildings can be an obscenely inefficient use of Kingdom money, too--think of how much mission or evangelism ministry could be done with the millions of dollars that go into most church buildings.  While buildings may be useful for ministry, we should try to get the most bang for the buck as possible and get out of the building business as quickly as possible.

There.  Those are some initial thoughts.  Now I have to go shopping for stained glass windows.

Pastoral Prayer (2nd Sun of Easter, Jn. 20:19-31)

Holy God:

We praise you in this glorious season in which we celebrate the Resurrection of your son, thegreatest of your miracles, the source of every miracle, the sign of your life-giving power, the hope of
future glory, and the beginning of new life in the here and now.

We confess to you that though we believe in the resurrection, we often fail to live in the newness of life
it offers. We are tempted to forget that the same spirit that raised Christ from the dead dwells in us,
and that in every moment we can live lives infused with power and possibility. We are often fearful—
fearful of a dangerous world, fearful of the sin within us, fearful of failure, fearful of threats within and
without.

So help us, holy God, to feel a fresh surge of your life-giving spirit. Help us to go on the offensive against the forces of darkness. Help us to combat hate with love. Help us to partner with you in your great plan to spread your light into every dark corner of your world. Help us to live as an Easter people—a people who risk greatly and love greatly because we know that when we act in obedience to you, we act with the full power of your resurrection filling us. Help us to answer your call to complete your work of making every dead thing alive again through the power of your spirit.
Amen.