The church is the people not the building - the role of church buildings
venbede
Shipmate
This truism, that the church is the people not the buildings, is often quoted at the present during the lockdown. I have known it often quoted on SoF generally by those who have little time for sacramental or symbolic worship. I know only too well how misleading concern or down right obsession with buildings can be. Of course the church is the body of Christ. But the buildings have an essential part to play. Let me start with some personal secular experience.
When I worked for a housing association one of my tasks was to visit homeless families who were referred to us for re housing. I understand that temporary housing is much better managed now. At that point they were often put in a room in the cheapest and most squalid hotels the local council could find. It was very depressing and it made me think that a family is the people not a building but without a place of their own they do not have a home. I leave you to work out the application to the church.
The church building can be a very powerful witness to the Christian faith if it is obviously a place where worship regularly takes place. And the church is not only the people not the building, it is also primarily the universal church throughout history not just the local congregation. The church building will embody that at an instinctive level showing that the church is more than just the people making up the local gathering.
When I worked for a housing association one of my tasks was to visit homeless families who were referred to us for re housing. I understand that temporary housing is much better managed now. At that point they were often put in a room in the cheapest and most squalid hotels the local council could find. It was very depressing and it made me think that a family is the people not a building but without a place of their own they do not have a home. I leave you to work out the application to the church.
The church building can be a very powerful witness to the Christian faith if it is obviously a place where worship regularly takes place. And the church is not only the people not the building, it is also primarily the universal church throughout history not just the local congregation. The church building will embody that at an instinctive level showing that the church is more than just the people making up the local gathering.
Comments
There are often almost insurmountable difficulties (and expense) in adapting even a nondescript Victorian church to make it better for weekday community use (not just for services).
It is greatly to the credit of all concerned that so many congregations (often quite small, numerically) do so much in the way of adapting and using their buildings, as part of their mission and witness to a generally indifferent world.
Radical changes are not always possible (although I admire the sort of thing Richard Giles has done here, and in the US), but it is still necessary to regard the church building as a useful asset - a tool, if you will - or even simply as somewhere to shelter the Faithful whilst they gather at Altar or Font...and NOT as some sort of ecclesiastical museum.
You could, of course, repent of your sins ...
Yes. My last church was a Grade 2 Listed building which was (and is) entirely useless for anything but worship, and costs a fortune to heat and maintain. When I was there we did take out some pews at the back to create a circulating/exhibition area (and to push the Faithful towards the front). This was a Big Job as (a) we had to get it past the Church Members' Meeting; (b) we had to get listed building consent; (c) there were potential problems with asbestos (in fact things were OK); (d) we couldn't just take out the pews but had to remove pew platforms, take up and later replace and renew the floor, renew wainscotting ... this cost over £10k ten years ago.
Besides that we had to do a lot of exterior stonework survey and renewal which included the complete dismantling and renewal of a large stained glass window ... I reckon the church has spent well over £100k keeping the building in good order (with some work still outstanding and interior redecoration badly needed as well) ... to hardly any practical advantage whatsoever. But it has had no choice. Of course visitors and wedding parties always said, "What a lovely church" but they didn't realise what a weight it was around our necks.
Having preached this mantra my entire life, now I and many other "church-is-people-not-the-building" proponents find ourselves with buildings that we can't expect to use, or at least not to their full potential, for some time, with all the financial constraints that involves. I think we need buildings but I absolutely hate having to make them a key part of our strategic planning right now. It would be a lot easier rethinking church practice inside out without one. For now.
I've always been strong on the "church is the people, not the building" line. But I increasingly appreciate what a building means to a congregation, quite apart from the practical concerns. The building carries all sorts of memories and meanings: it is the place where I got married to the love of my life; it is the place where my late husband created the wooden carved stations of the cross; it is the place where a group of us worked so hard to raise the money to equip the kitchen that has so transformed what we can do to serve our community. I could go on.
The building carries all sorts of meanings and significance to the congegation. And often, clergy just don't get it, because they are rarely around long enough for the building to have any such personal memories. So clergy tend to see the building in purely utilitarian ways. And bishops are even worse in this respect, given that very few of them have ever spent a long time in parish ministry. They frequently just don't comprehend the sense of ownership that people have in "their" church. It may be a cold, costly stone blob, but it is ours and without it we would lose an important part of our identity.
The worst of it is that around half that 200k came from the sale of an older, equally beloved, church on the other side of the island. We already consigned one building (the latest of I don't know how many over the last century) to history and don't even have a functioning building to show for it. Really it is far too big for our needs but it is the only place you can hold a large funeral, which here means up to half the population.
The church is Grade I so the stock response of TPTB, secular and ecclesiastical, to any proposal is No.
That leads me to wonder as I read the thread whether something has been lost.
Those who built our churches, from the Saxons through to the Victorians, did so with a belief that the architectural splendour and beauty of the buildings glorified God. God loved beauty so the people made beautiful houses for God. There was also a sense that they were sacrificing effort and hard cash to God, thus proving how much they worshipped Him. Even our newer churches, like the cathedrals at Liverpool and Coventry, glorify God in their architecture.
I don't know how old the saying "'The church is the people not the building" is but it's obvious that one of the ways the people expressed their love of God was architecture.
From the tone here that seems to have been lost and the upkeep of old churches and cathedrals is now seen as a regrettable distraction from what you 'should' be doing, rather than a continuation of that sacrifice.
My dad, who had defence clients for many years, once remarked to me that he'd often wondered where the energy and care put into cathedrals went now, and had concluded it went into missile systems...
It's true to say Henry VIII broke up the monasteries to pay for his wars with France so there may be something in that. Though the building of great churches and war had co-existed before that. Maybe the shift happened with the Reformation and later on (in the UK at least) with the Puritans. Though the Puritans also created a bit of a backlash. The Victorians are possibly an exception as they beautified and decorated absolutely everything they built.
I think where a lot of us are at is that it can be part of what we're doing, and there is a place for beauty and awe expressed in architecture in drawing people to God. The problem is that, as I mentioned, buildings can suck up everything - time, money, attention - and leave nothing left for people. The church (people) is no longer large enough to devote the resources required to maintain the churches (buildings) bequeathed to us by our forebears. And while we are absorbed with trying to preserve the buildings, the church (people) shrinks and shrinks because our attention is not on serving others and helping people come to know God.
I would say The Church is struggling with down-sizing but that the architecture is only part of that struggle. Dealing with the loss of relevance in society is arguably harder for The Church and for many Christians.
I don't think the church is shrinking because members of the church no longer have their attention on serving others and helping people come to know God. It's shrinking, and has been shrinking for many decades now, because many people no longer desire what the church offers and because the spiritual market-place is crowded with beliefs, many of which are wholly materialistic.
Two thoughts here. One is that the "primitive" Church didn't have buildings but met in public spaces and private houses ... which isn't to say that some of those Christians might just have yearned for buildings of their own! The other is that declining congregations get absolutely fed up of having PCC meeting after meeting, or all their time and energies, focused on "keeping the building up" when they'd prefer to be serving the community or engaging in Gospel proclamation.
By the way I am not necessarily arguing for buildings which are merely utilitarian, nor am I denying that great architecture can lift people heavenwards. I do believe that God created beauty and loves it.
(Cross-posted with above).
Certainly the building glorified the benefactor, both in this world and, so they were told, in the next. And I sympathise with the PCC committee having to deal with this. In fact it forms one of the minor plot strands in my novel (for the elimination of doubt I'm posting here as an enthusiast of church architecture and not as a researcher!) where the PCC has divided into factions: one focused on the building and the other on 'outreach' work.
I also know that many early church buildings were very simple, but even simple stone is expensive when most buildings were wooden-framed.
That stone in turn created a problem for The Church because stone endures so in many places the local church is the oldest building by some centuries and has become a symbol of endurance and custodian of the past.
One Anglican priest of my acquaintance tells a story about one of the four churches in his rural living. One of the churchwardens informed him after his induction that one of his (the churchwarden's) ancestors had built that church in the thirteenth century.
The Ryme of the Ancient Parishioner....
So it is not just the building that matters.
(Sadly the next Chaplain was having none of it and somehow got rid of everything. Even the chairs were sold off, as we discovered when having lunch in a pub some 50 miles away, seated on named chapel chairs! )
What he failed to understand was the demographic structure of the parish, with three distinct communities. These communities maintain a balance of ministries, without which the parish would fail. The three church buildings - one stone, one little weatherboard God-box and a 60's vintage town church all have links to their communities. The stone church has descendants of families who began worshipping when the parish began 175 years ago, and who still maintain the buildings and the grounds.
The bishop's lack of insight led to national media coverage of our response, and a swift backdown on his part. Parish life continued to grow until Covid-19 hit, but we are moving to new ways of worship and community ministry. The challenge will be to re-establish those community links which have been suspended such as kids' club, playgroup and kinship group [for grandparents and others caring for small children], all of which have been established or re-energised in the last couple of years. It is through these, along with funeral hospitality and opshop, that we live out our mission to the community.
Rant alert
The ones I get really annoyed about, though, are people who take the line that the building and the people are there to keep on doing something they never themselves bother to take part in. That seems to me to be not just a false reassurance but a very dangerous one, eternally. So, if somebody else is preserving both the building and forms of services exactly how they imagine their great-grandmother would have known it, that gives them the delusional comfort that it lets them off having to respond to God's call on their lives.
They are often the ones that complain loudest when anything is abandoned or changed. At it's core is an assumption that the kingdom of heaven is there to make us feel good about ourselves without having to do anything in return.
Rant over
Their Facebook page was soon swamped with cries of horror 'O! It doesn't look like a Proper Church any more! A Proper Church MUST have pews!', and so on ad nauseam.
Of course, the PCC had gone through all the due processes of wrestling with demons the various conservation bodies, the DAC, etc. etc., so nothing was done without official sanction.
I bet NOT ONE of those 'Shock! Horror!' people ever actually attends that church...or even stops to think that the pews were a 19thC addition to a mediaeval building, anyway.
But English Heritage were equally quite, quite sure a barn conversion in the village I grew up in had to be tiled in tiles that matched the nearby buildings, even if they had to be specially made, even though it the pitch of the roof strongly suggested they were all originally thatched, like some of the neighbours.
It was a mix - some who had drifted away returned, others were new worshippers, and a couple of the programs grew from a realisation that this was a parish with a will to make them a success. Existing loyalties were strengthened, but so were intertwining loyalties across the parish, eliminating some grudges which had lasted for the better part of a century.
English Heritage decided that the church needed repairs. For six months the congregation moved to the "tin hut" village hall on The Street. Once a month they had a family service called "DCD" - short for "Do Church Different" ("doing different" being very much a Norfolk phrase). Attendances increased, sometimes up to 30 at DCD services.
Once the repairs were concluded, the Faithful discussed what to do. Of course they all wanted to go back to the Proper Church, every week. You can guess the outcome (although the church is now linked into a network of churches resourced from the nearest town which may improve matters).
I reject the claim that “the church is not about buildings”. The #ExeterBook describes churches as “leomo laemena”, limbs of clay: the church Body, fashioned of the same clay (limmus) as Adam. People and churches: living and compacted clay, both fashioned for prayer and praise.
As I entered into a prison chapel I was struck by its atmosphere of holiness - I don’t know how else to describe it. The chaplain said that many people remarked upon it. She put it down to the centuries of prayer which had soaked into its fabric.
Yes, the church is its people, past and present and future, and yes we have the richness of the church buildings to appreciate and utilise as well as to concern ourselves with and maintain if we can. It’s both/and, not either/or.
Those free churches near to us who used to meet in school or village halls have raised the cash to convert buildings into churches. They might be modern and relatively maintenance free now, but later congregations will be worrying about the roof too, no doubt.
However, I also can remember the Scottish Presbyterian Chaplain at my University saying that a place where much prayer has been said has its own patina. Undoubtedly, when and where we encounter the divine, remains special to us. The Almighty may be beyond space and time but we are not.
Not necessarily. People can project onto a ruin their own version of spirituality whereas a building alive with worship and prayer might put them off because the religious practises within it do not accord with their needs.
For example: I live in a town where many of the inhabitants and the thousands of visitors hold the entire local landscape sacred and celebrate it with bongo-drums, chants, clootie tree hangings, meditation, incense, charms, crystals, and you-name-it-it's-here, that can only be accommodated because whatever original beliefs occupied the local inhabitants have vanished.
It's the same at Avebury, Stonehenge, and other ancient sacred sites which have become loci of spiritual practice.
There was a tree where I used to live on which people attached their prayers in any way they liked: some written, some simply ribbons or pieces of cloth or paper, etc. In the church I attend there is an interactive prayer tree where people can do the same.
A 'thin' place is a 'thin' place, whether indoors or outdoors.
I believe that a building alive with worship and prayer becomes a 'thin' place, one in which the sense of spiritual holiness is tangible to many people. Perhaps like the burning bush, where one feels the need to kick off one's shoes.
It isn't Milton Keynes!
Sorry, MK was a joke as it was the least spiritual place I could think of. If there is a ruined tower on the high point you are probably looking towards Glastonbury.
As for Glastonbury - you might be right!
You see what you are talking about are heterotopias, places which can sustain a number of divergent discourse simultaneously. However, by their very nature, despite what Foucauld says, places of worship are hetertopias at least for those belonging to the cult.
But I understand what you mean. It still seems to back up my point that a building full of worshippers won't necessarily be more attractive to people than a ruin/empty building onto which they can transfer what beliefs they hold.
Unless you are talking about Dartmoor Prison, I'm not aware of any prisons in England and Wales that have been used for centuries (over 200 years). Of course, you could be talking of another country, although some of the English-speaking countries have very few buildings that old. Where was this chapel?
Lancaster Castle? Obviously now out of commission but was still a functioning prison up until a decade ago, and has a chapel.
It was Norwich prison chapel, which I see is 19th century so it was a bit of an exaggeration, but there had been prayer in that place in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, and it had a special atmosphere of God’s peace.
The second place I held services was in a jail multi purpose room. We rolled in an altar on wheels stored in a near by closet and added some religious pictures on the walls. Soon I noticed that the staff started calling it the chapel instead of the multi purpose room. It was used during the day for all kinds of different staff activities from folding laundry to sorting mail and even parol hearings. Multi-purpose room remained on the door but in conversation it was always from then on called the chapel.
I think the feeling of being a part of the saints who have moved on is held in the building, and that is important. I can not say just what it is but in some places of worship I have a strong feeling of it being filled with the prayers of others over time. It does feel like I am standing on Holy Ground.
However, a non believer would invariably think that the church was a building.