An Anti-Building Polemic

One of the things that has long bothered me about many churches is the whole building boom. For most of my life now, the mentality seems to have been, "Well, we feel a little crowded on Sunday mornings in our one service, so it's time to build a brand spanking new church with a sanctuary so big we'll never be able to fill it and with all the bells and whistles."  And so some church ends up overextending itself financially to build some ridiculously ostentatious monstrosity.

A primary argument I have heard in favor of this makes use of the great cathedrals of Europe. After all, look at all the great monuments built back in the medieval era.  We (post)moderns are just trying to "honor God" with our imposing edifices like the medieval Christians did.

Two problems with that line of thinking - one big, one little.  The little one first - I have yet to see a church building constructed in my lifetime that comes anywhere close to the visual power and impact of, say, Chartres Cathedral in France or St. Peter's Basilica.  Not even close.  all the new buildings I've seen are cookie cutter approaches that fail to say, "Hey, contemplate how great God is"; saying, instead, "Hey, look at how rich our church is."

The bigger problem with the "We're just doing what they did in earlier eras of the church" argument is one of purpose.  Medieval Christians did not build cathedrals to make more room for worshippers or because they wanted to update the technology of the church.  The construction of a cathedral often took hundreds of years, so they had to have a larger purpose... and they did.  

Medieval cathedrals were textbooks in stone and mortar, paint and pigment.  Average everyday Christians in medieval communities couldn't read, much less own a Bible.  They couldn't even understand the language of the worship services - mass was conducted in Latin.  So the only avenue for them to learn about God was through the environment in which they worshipped.  If you've ever walked into a gothic style cathedral, you know that there is a powerful sense of the immensity of God and the insignificance of man when you first encounter those vaulted ceilings soaring hundreds of feet above you.  Later churches and cathedrals would add frescoes of biblical scenes - visually depicting important lessons for parishioners.

Now that you know all that, ask yourself how many of these new church buildings are monuments to education and how many are monuments to wealth and poor stewardship.  Yeah, that's why I am becoming more and more aggravated each time I drive by some brand new, multi-million dollar facility that is neither needed nor appropriate.  

When will we realize that our money is better invested in people than pews?