becoming

My good friend Anson on the idolatry of the glamorous church.

I had this experience just the previous weekend, when a few brothers and sisters from my church attended a wedding ceremony at another church. Many of them expressed a deep appreciation of the beauty of the church building, while to me, without denying the aesthetics beauty of it, I’m much more concern about the rotten theology and worldview of the church (ie. the people) itself.

On deeper thought, isn’t that the dichotomy we always found ourselves in? Either we look at the building at awe and assume the people likewise, or we look at the people and than negate the apparent beauty which the building conveys. A church building is just a space. Whether outsiders know what is really going on among those worshiping inside it, a church building can still arouse certain emotion just by entering it. There is no right or wrong here. Just impulses and responses. We just can’t link the aesthetics beauty of a building (or lack of) to the people, and/or g/God that they worship, and vice versa.

And on the theology side, I think we have a strong tendency to resurrect the Temple Theology back into our times — a physical building that symbolizes and signifies the presence of God. I have a problem with that. Like Anson, I am not against aesthetics; but if I understand the NT correctly, Jesus had, time and time again, fought against such an idea. The presence of God is not to be found in a building with a physical address attached to it; it is to be found in the person Jesus Christ. Jesus gathered his disciples not around the Temple in Jerusalem, he gathered them around himself.

There is a lot more to be said, like the way we think certain place in a church (building) is more scared than others (I was brought up not to eat or drink in the so-called “Sanctuary”). This is not a comment based purely on tidiness, there is something deeply theological behind it. Paul Stevens of Regent wrote some good (and to some, controversial) reflections on this.

One more thing, Anson mentioned “a trend in the postmodern church falling into the lure of glamor, vulnerable to its deception”, but I thought it is the other way around. Mega-churches and the prosperity gospel go almost hand in hand on this — both however, are very “modern” phenomena. The church that are more sensitive to the postmodern culture, tends to focus less on the building and more on its mission. I have yet to visit Mars Hill in Michigan, but from what I gathered so far their church building, even though it is a renovated old shopping mall and can seat a little less than 4000, it is really not that impressive or glamorous, compare to these.

[Related: What’s in a building?]

N.B. In protest, I reject the temptation to get an image with this post that depicts glamour.