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.

Pastoral Prayer for Easter Day (inspired by 1 Cor. 15))

Holy God:

We give you praise with hearts full of thanksgiving on this, the greatest of days, the day your Son rose
from the dead to show us that death had been destroyed. You have given us the perfect sign of your
faithfulness, you miracle working power, and your love that gives us ultimate victory.

We confess to you that deep in our hearts, the reality of the continuing power of death continues to
weigh us down and limit our ability to celebrate fully. We feel the power of death in our bodies. We still grieve over those who have died ahead of us. We experience the power of death drawing our souls into the dust. We struggle to overcome the sin within us. We struggle to overcome cynicism and a gnawing sense that our world is corrupt beyond repair.

Help us to see the many small and great demonstrations of your life-giving power overcoming the
blasphemous claims of death all around us. Help us to believe in our bones that the resurrection is not
some beautiful fairy tale of something that happened ago, but a demonstration of the way your life
renews all life. Help us to believe beyond our seeing that you are even now swallowing up every kind of death in your victory. Help us to live in every moment so that we will spread your life and participate in the renewing of everything.

Most of all, give each of us new life. To those who have never been made alive by your spirit, may
this Easter Sunday be the beginning of a new birth to a life lived with you, a life of power, joy, and
confidence, a life lived in wonder and awe of your miracle working power. For those of us who have
grown weary and lost our easter vision, help us to feel a fresh surge of your resurrection power making
everything dead within us alive again.

You said that if the same spirit that raised Christ from the dead dwelt in us, he would give new life to our mortal bodies. So bring healing to every broken body, joy to every broken spirit, reconciliation to every broken relationship, and peace to our broken world.

Amen.

Pastoral Prayer based on Luke 15:1-3, 11-32 (the Parable of the Prodigal God)

Holy God

Thank you for bringing us into this house of worship once again today.  Thank you for the joy we feel as we share this hour with those we love.  Thank you most of all, for the grace we feel here, the love you have extended to us, the welcome we feel simply because we are all loved by you and your grace swings the door wide open for all who enter.  We thank you that this place is a sign of the love, the grace, and the welcome that you offer us in all times and all places, that your forgiveness is a banquet of joy and love to which we are continually invited.

We confess that we have often failed to accept your invitation.  We’ve wanted to go our own way.  We’ve needed to figure things out on our own.  Either through our own misunderstanding or through the failed witness of others, we’ve often misunderstood what you are calling us to.  We’ve run from you because we’ve thought that you were a hard task master, or that you wanted to make our live boring or lifeless.  We’ve very rarely thought of the grace you’ve offered us as an opportunity to live lives of celebration and rejoicing, a banquet, a party celebrating your goodness and redemption.

So whether we’ve run away from your grace because wee wanted the life we could create for ourselves more than the life you have for us, or even if we’ve been good religious people who’ve been so stuck on following the rules and being good citizens that we’ve forgotten what it means to truly feast on your mercy, help us to enter your house with fresh love, fresh grace, fresh joy.  Let the party of your grace begin.

Be with those who suffer.  Make them know your closeness and bring them new life.  Bless our enemies.  Bless those who are far from your family.

Amen.

Pastoral Prayer based on Luke 13:1-9 (parable of the unfruitful fig tree)

Holy God:

We thank you for the love you have poured out to us, the love you are pouring out right now, and the love you have sent before us for the needs ahead of us.  We thank you that you chose us without regard to our deserving.  We thank you that you have given us your word, your spirit, your very lifeblood.  You have given us each other.  You have given us new hearts and loving friends, countless sermons and Bible Studies, a comfortable building in which to worship, and so much more than we can ever name.  

You have told us to abide in you, and we are thankful that you want to abide with us.  You also said that if we abide in you and your word abides in us, then we would produce fruit that would last.  Those words comfort us, but they also worry us.  Because they teach us that the life you have invested in us should produce a return.  And you have taught us that you will hold us accountable for producing the fruit that your love should produce.

So help us to take a hard look at ourselves, both as individuals and as a church.  Help us to honestly take account of what we have produced--how we have loved others, how we have grown as disciples, how we have helped others to come to faith.  Today, let us honestly hear from you what good has come from all those hours in church and all those sermons and all our religious activity.  We want to be made new.  We want our lives to be fruitful.

We cannot be anything other than what we have always been unless you remake us.  So help us, holy God, to feel our need to be nourished, shaped, transformed, and reconnected.  And help our lives to bring a harvest of righteousness.

Amen.

Pastoral Prayer for Lent 2 (Luke 13:31-35--Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how I have longed to gather you under my wings...)

Holy God--

Your son taught us to be holy, as you are holy.  He said that if we would hold onto our lives, we would lose them, but if we would lay down our lives for for you and for th esake of the Gospel, we would find them.  We have often felt your spirit moving within us to give our all, and we have sometimes answered that call as best as we can.  Our feet are made of clay and the voices that draw us away are many.  As the old hymn says, we are prone to wander.  Yet you keep calling--you tell us that your goal is to make us perfect in our love.

When we hide from you, as Adam hid from you in the garden, we ask you to come looking for us, as you did him.  Let us hear your voice.  O holy and loving God, let all our repenting be about nothing more than running into your arms.  May we never feel shamed or cajoled, bullied, manipulated or coerced.  For your call to be holy is always a call to come in from the rain, to come away from ways of living that destroy us.  Help us to find ourselves, to be made safe from the storms of this life, under the shelter of your wings.

We offer our all, as you have offered all of yourself to us.  We give our money because it is not ours but yours, and you have made us stewards.  We thank you for your provision and give back the portion you commanded in thanksgiving.  We offer you those who we love who are hurting--may your love overshadow them, comfort and heal them.  we offer our land and this community.  Help us to run to you and to find ourselves under the loving care of your Lordship.

Amen.

Pastoral Prayer for the First Sunday of Lent

Holy God,

We remember this day a time when your Son went away to be alone in the wilderness, to fast and pray, to be alone with you.  He took time out of his life to confront those things that were a temptation to him.  He confronted the devil.  Help us, through these forty days and always, never to run from those things within us that make us afraid, those places where the unknown and uncomfortable dwell, the broken places of unforgiveness and misdirected motives, of insecurity, of rage, of loneliness and hopelessness.  We will do anything to hide from ourselves.  We will invite any distraction.  We will fill our lives with noise and people and a thousand excuses.  But the demons still whisper to us and the wilderness cannot be contained.  Give us the courage to finally face it, to face ourselves, to have the guts not to run away from whatever we’ve been running from for so long.

We thank you that when we go to the wilderness, we don’t go alone.  We go with you.  We go together.  And because you are there, it is you who give us comfort.  You are the one who makes our hearts perfect.  So we present ourselves to you.  We want to give ourselves completely, but maybe we’re not quite ready for that yet.  So take what we can give today, and grace us to give it all.  Grace us to have a perfect heart totally given in love to you.

Amen.