BLOG 1/24/16. “SELL YOUR CHURCH BUILDING AND WE’LL SEE …”
I think it was missiologist Howard Snyder, a few years ago, in his significant book: The Problem of Wineskins who suggested that if you really want to know how healthy your church is that you should sell your church building and you would see. I teasingly told him that he could get killed proposing something like that. For so many, many ostensible churches they exist to have these elaborate meeting places, which in turn become idols for them. They have invested huge dollars for erecting such remarkable architectural monuments, with something like a Field of Dreams illusion, that if you have a significant church edifice that people will naturally be attracted to it. They do this with a totally false understanding of what the church is to be by the calling of God.
I, for one, do not really see any way around some inevitable confrontation with this issue. Church folk become idolatrous about their church buildings even when such buildings become so expensive to maintain that they become an ‘albatross’ around the neck of what are usually diminishing and ageing congregations reminiscing about their golden years of yore.
And there is no easy answer to such. I’ve been there. I was pastor of a congregation that inhabited such a handsome gothic sanctuary, which had been constructed early in the 20th century in what was at that time a substantial and genteel middle-class neighborhood, but in the intervening years had declined into a marginal neighborhood, and those who had been the comfortable persons of means who could maintain such, had died, or grown old or moved away, and the once lovely building had become the target of some urban vandals, and was much in need of expensive renovation of its heating and air-conditioning systems … and was altogether out of date in so many ways.
A new generation were finding life in the congregation, and it was their meeting place, but they were not interested in investing large sums necessary to bring it up to code. What to do? A prominent architect was assigned the task of discerning a solution, but after doing a study of the building and a time-space-use of it, proposed to us that what it would cost to refurbish it could not be justified as good stewardship, and that his suggestion was that we demolish it and arrange to replace it with a high-rise residential structure with space reserved on its lower floors for our church meetings. It could be self-amortizing, and useful seven days a week, and was easily accessible by public transportation. He would be happy to design an upgrade for the church and make money off of us, but he didn’t think that would be good Christian stewardship.
When presented to our church leadership, they all knew that what he had proposed was inescapably true, but none were willing to destroy the building which had become essentially an idol to so many. And so the building continued to deteriorate with occasional patch-up temporary solutions, delaying the inevitable day..
This identity of church buildings as essential to the church is a hangover from the Christendom era with its dependence upon ‘sanctuaries’ and ‘clergy’ both of which are something of a subversion of Christianity. But now in this emerging post-Christian and increasingly secular culture, and with a vast number of such once elegant but now decaying buildings, the issue looms huge … and in many ways intractable.
Recently ISIS destroyed a fourteen century old monastery in the Middle East, which is tragic in a historic sense but unless the building was itself ‘the church’ it did not diminish the Christian church. In my neighborhood a once thriving Baptist church diminished and was sold to a developer and is now a neighborhood of condominiums. But elsewhere, nearby, vibrant communities of Christian faith are flourishing in storefronts, school buildings, and around dinner tables.
What do you do with elegant old church buildings? Their days might be numbered.
