Why
congregations build buildings is an interesting study? Back in the 80’s I regularly heard church
people remark, “If you want people to come to your church, build a new building.” The idea was that if a congregation could
afford to build, then it was a vibrant and growing fellowship; not some stuck
in mud, always done it this way, old stogey club. Consequentially, a lot of new church
buildings went up in the 80’s symbolizing congregations trying to make a name
for themselves in the grand competition for new members that went on between
churches. Unfortunately, the result was
mostly “sheep stealing” rather than new disciples of Jesus. Congregations lost members to each other over
what amounts to religious consumerism. Congregations
were making a name for themselves through building up-to-date facilities to
house their snazzy church programming and charismatic ministers, and people
came (from other churches), but they did little to further the name of Jesus.
That
was the ‘80’s. Here’s a more currently
vexing problem – spending money on restoring church buildings. The rebuilding of Notre Dame Cathedral stands
as a blatant example of this problem.
Should Christians contribute to rebuilding it? I would argue that Notre Dame Cathedral is
more representative of French culture than it is of Roman Catholicism and
certainly more than the simple carpenter it is supposed to represent. Estimates for rebuilding it are as much as $8
billion. $8 billion would rectify a lot humanitarian
need. Relief for the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami
totalled $6.25 billion, the largest amount ever raised for humanitarian needs. They can rebuild Notre Dame Cathedral, but
let’s acknowledge the effort has nothing to do with Jesus who said, “When you
did it unto the least of these my family, you did it unto me.” This is the question we must ask when we look
at sinking a lot of money into maintaining old buildings.
Back
to building new churches; building a new church these days is a rare
occurrence. Today in North American we are dissolving more congregations and
selling the buildings than we are planting congregations and building
facilities to house them. Most church
buildings are simply ghostly reminders of the day when Western culture and
Christian religion walked hand-in-hand, a relationship that has all but
withered. The idea that a culture, a
civilization needs a god to make it great has all but died.
Looking
at Genesis, the relationship between a culture and its god is at the heart of
what the story of The Tower of Babel is about.
We have a tendency to mistakenly think that the story of the Tower of
Babel is about a group of humans who got prideful and wanted to build a tower
so high that they could stand equal to God and so God punished them by
confusing their languages. But the story
of Babel is better read as the parable of how humans try to use God to make
their civilizations safe, secure, and culturally great.
If
we step back roughly 5,000 thousand years to ancient Mesopotamia, we would find
that they built tall step-pyramids with temples beside them. The tower in this story is one of those step
pyramids or ziggurats as they are called.
The idea behind them was not climbing the pyramids in order to go into
the heavens to be with the gods. That’s
what mountaintops were for. These
ziggurats worked the other way. They
were rather staircases for the gods to come down to earth from the heavens to
come be with the people by taking their place in temples.
The
people at Babel were building the highest of step-pyramids to try to get the
highest of all gods to come down and be their god in order to make their
civilization great. Mind you, as the
story goes, God had commanded humans to spread out over the earth. But, the Babel folks stopped short of that
mandate and decided to settle down and build an empire.
Babel
represents our human attempts to build civil religions. Civil religion is when we use God to undergird
our ways of doing civic community rather than trying to get our communities to
reflect God’s way of doing community as modeled by the way of Jesus Christ. Civil religion is asking God to bless our
empire building, our ideas of prosperity and power, rather than committing
ourselves to God’s kingdom and the way of Jesus Christ. It’s our using God to make own name great.
When
I see a new church building a question comes to mind: Is this just one more
Tower of Babel? Is this just one more congregation
trying to get God to make its name, its programming, its charismatic
minister…great. I am suspicious of this fundamental
need we seem to have as congregations to have a sacred space represented by a
building. If we read the Bible from
cover to cover we find the trajectory that God is on is not housing his
presence in buildings. God doesn’t want
a building where he can be with his people. God actually wants a body. God wants to be embodied in human community. That’s why God the Son became the human
person, Jesus. That’s why God filled the
followers of Jesus with the Holy Spirit.
The
last thing Jesus said to his disciples before ascending was to mandate them to
go into the world and make disciples. We
did that for a few centuries and met in homes, caves, and even tombs. Yet, soon enough we let ourselves get coopted
by Empire and we have been embroiled in civil religion ever since…at least until
recently here in North America. Now its
time to yield to the Holy Spirit and leave the building mentality behind, and
as the body of Christ, get back to making disciples of Jesus everywhere we are
– in our homes, in our neighbourhoods, in our work places, in coffee shops, in
schools, and even in church basements.
The mandate and the drive of the Spirit is to go forth, not to settle
down. Amen.
