Church Buildings: Tombstones for Eden and Declarations of Future Hope
Featured, Meditations — By Larry Shallenberger on April 11, 2010 at 12:00 am“But many of the priests and Levites and heads of the Father’s houses, old men who had seen the first house, wept when they saw the foundation of this house being laid, though many shouted for joy, so that the people could not distinguish the sound of the joyful shout from the sound of the people’s weeping.”
Ezra 3:12-13a
I’ve recently been struck with the reality that church buildings are memorials of the Fall.
An N.T. Wright quote will never allow me to walk into a church building again without a twinge of grief. Wright commented on the creation account in Genesis and remarked that we tend to flatten out the story in an attempt to combat Darwinian thought. We do this at the expense of the bigger picture God was communicating. Wright looks at the six days of creation and said that the point of the poem is that God was creating a meeting place between himself and humanity with the order and intention that someone might construct a temple or a tabernacle. The entire plan
et was intended to be a chalice where God poured his love out on humanity.
God’s love and our responses, then, were intended to be free-ranging, without fences or borders. They were to be expanding relationships that would fill this planet.
Church buildings, then, are shadows of what should be. We gather, worship, and attempt to connect with God– if only for a fleeting moment. Instead of learning right and wrong from a God who visits us daily, we drive to a building, sit in a seat and give our attention to a preacher who has struggled with the text to give us an accurate picture of who God is and what he expects. The joy that we experience in our worship has to be evoked by worship leaders, organs, guitars, vocalists, choirs.
These experiences are valuable, needed, and even commanded in the New Testament. And they are only rudimentary expressions of what life was before our exile from Eden. These moments are whispered rumors of scenes we have never witnessed first hand, scenes that we hope really occurred and might be reclaimable. We localize these faint whispers within the walls of a church building because if we didn’t, they wouldn’t be noticed at all.
So we collect our whispers and bring them to buildings to grieve a planet that is too broken to receive Divine Grace and Love like a cup.
And we rejoice knowing God will heal this world and empty our churches and return our joy and our worship and our love to this expanse of this planet and the people who fill it and we will meet God and it will be like a walk in a garden.
Our church buildings will be empty someday, and it will literally be Heaven.
9 Comments
It’s a Church of Christ! Woo Hoo! They rarely get any publicity!
Yikes, I think we missed a product placement opportunity!
Hmm, good thoughts. I wonder if this is why I’ve never liked church? I have always gone, and am involved, but it’s because I know I’m supposed to and never once been because I longed to. Maybe what I’ve been longing for was lost and it just isn’t time for its return yet.
You know, Ceri, I wonder if we didn’t lose our capacity for an edenic existence at the Fall. Another way to look how we do church is that it’s God’s way of preparing our character for life heaven’s community. It’s training.
Training helps me set my expectations in a better place. There’s ups and downs and days where you just are not feeling it.
I wrote a book a few years ago on my struggles (and love) of church. Google Book lets you look at much of it for free. Here’s the link: http://books.google.com/books?id=_YE5k6NvXQkC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Divine+Intention+Larry+Shallenberger&ei=iAfDS4f0BJTaMcWXrOAH&cd=1#v=onepage&q&f=false
I don’t think its wrong too feel discontentment with church. It’s just what we chose to do with it that’s key.
Pay no mind to the building. Church is supposed to be more than that. It is supposed to be a community of fellow believers. The joy and love are supposed to flow from God through the Body of Christ. If the Church is only a building to you, then I suggest you get connected or find a church that holds that joy and love. The beautiful thing about having Christ living in us is that we have the capacity to change the Church because WE ARE the Church. I want to tell you that there are healthy churches out there where you CAN grow spiritually with other believers. If those none of those places work, you could start a home church. I don’t believe there are rules about what Church has to be, I think God just wants us share with fellow believer how He has been working in our lives.
Andrew, I might be biased because I’m an architect but I think the idea of “pay no mind to the building” is a part and symptom of what’s led to the weakness of the modern church. When church buildings are metal warehouses thrown up in a week and look just like the strip club down the street, or megabuildings that cost millions and look like a convention center, that’s a problem. The church building is supposed to be a holy place, it it supposed to evoke an understanding of spirituality and reverence, and most modern church buildings don’t do that. Church architecture needs to be given much more thought than it is these days.
I am a great admirer! Appreciate your offering this
I see good points in the comments from both Andrew and Josh. “Church” is so much more than just a building. (a church can even meet in a bagel shop) If we are not the Body of Christ 24-7, it really doesn’t matter what kind of building we gather in. Many types of churches cannot afford, or choose not to spend money on, a building. On the other hand, modern congregations have gone too far in trying to blend in and build structures that look like everything else, or in creating monuments to a leader. Church buildings can create a sense of the sacred, and help draw folks into the presence of God. That is something that has been lost in many circles.
I do agree that church buildings, no matter what form they take, are memorials of the Fall. They are, in a sense, stations on the way to the restoration of Creation and the time we can truly worship the Father.
I see good points in the comments from both Andrew and Josh. “Church” is so much more than just a building. (a church can even meet in a bagel shop) If we are not the Body of Christ 24-7, it really doesn’t matter what kind of building we gather in. Many types of churches cannot afford, or choose not to spend money on, a building. On the other hand, modern congregations have gone too far in trying to blend in and build structures that look like everything else, or in creating monuments to a leader. Church buildings can create a sense of the sacred, and help draw folks into the presence of God. That is something that has been lost in many circles.
I do agree that church buildings, no matter what form they take, are memorials of the Fall. They are, in a sense, stations on the way to the restoration of Creation and the time we can truly worship the Father.