BLOG 3/7/17. EXACTLY WHERE DOES GOD DWELL? WHERE IS HIS HOUSE?

BLOG 3/7/17. EXACTLY WHERE DOES GOD DWELL? WHERE IS HIS HOUSE?

Does that sound like a stupid question? Or does it have anything to do with anything? I only raise it because of a couple of experiences that pass across my scope regularly. The first is that I frequently hear the comment coming from the pulpit about how: “we are meeting here in the house of God on this Sunday morning,” as though the building is where we come to visit God. That has deep roots into the history of the Christian movement. The Jews had the sacred temple in Jerusalem and the pagan religions had their shrines and temples, … but the Christian movement emerged and was contagious as a movement, and not wedded to such places … until the Roman emperor Constantine thought he was doing something to favor the previously persecuted church by endowing the church with grnd sacred places, … this notwithstanding that the early martyr Stephen had brought down the wrath of the Jewish leadership by stating unequivocally that God “does not dwell in  temples made with hands” (Acts 7:48).

So, if not in sacred buildings, where does God dwell? Well, the apostles made it plain that God dwells in his church, his called-out New Creation community. That community is the “dwelling place of God by the Holy Spirit.”  God dwells in the lives and community of his people. Where they are, God dwells. A particular community of those in whom Christ lives may gather  at a given time, or a given place, … but that place is not “God’s house.” But, alas! after Constantine that subversion became almost normative for most of the church, and that has persisted  for a millennium and a half in too much of the church’s movement. When the church was in unusual circumstances, or under persecution, it only communicated its meeting places secretly as temporary gathering locations, that changed frequently. The Wesleyan awakening was controversial in Anglican Church circles, so the Wesleyans had their meeting houses in public rooms, or wherever. Or the Quakers had their meeting houses, but they were not conceived of as sacralized places.

In more recent generations there have been voices such as Jaques Ellul, who flatly labelled such ‘sacralized’ places as a subversion of the Christian faith. Missiologist Howard Snyder surfaced the problem in his book, The Problem of Wineskins, in which he proposes that if you want to know how healthy your church is, then sell your church building! But such voices fall too often on deaf ears. There was a binge of building grand new structures as church institutions seeking to make their mark after World War II by investing huge amounts of money in structures hoping that these would attract new participants.

Ah! but the second provocation for my raising this questions is that there are so many new reports about how people are leaving the church, “O woe! O woe!” … While actually, something very healthy is taking place: Colonies of thoughtful (mostly) younger followers of Christ are meeting in vibrant, smaller, versatile, flexible colonies in which relationships and mutual faith and responsibility to one another are the key. Such an emerging generation is not into sacred buildings, nor are they wedded to life-long membership, … rather they are into an interactive and caring “one another” recreation of God’s design for his New Humanity community. To be sure, there are gifted teachers who find larger public forums for their ministry of equipping God’s people, but these are also often mobile and temporary.

When God dwells in you by his Spirit, and in me by his Spirit, then we share his mutual life and there is an immediate bond between us by which we become, in a real sense, Christ to one another. God dwells in his New Creation community. That community is his glory, his presence in all the myriad contexts. Church institutions may be on the decline and sanctuaries for sale, but the church is growing in coffee shops, and house churches, and under the banyan trees of the world. God is subverting the subversion of his church in creating it in new forms. Cheers!

About rthenderson

Sixty years a pastor-teacher within the Presbyterian Church. Author of several books, the latest of which are a trilogy on missional ecclesiology: ENCHANTED COMMUNITY: JOURNEY INTO THE MYSTERY OF THE CHURCH, then, REFOUNDING THE CHURCH FROM THE UNDERSIDE, then THE CHURCH AND THE RELENTLESS DARKNESS. Previous to this trilogy was A DOOR OF HOPE: SPIRITUAL CONFLICT IN PASTORAL MINISTRY, and SUBVERSIVE JESUS, RADICAL FAITH. I am a native of West Palm Beach, Florida, a graduate of Davidson College, then of Columbia and Westminster Theological Seminaries.
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