Expensive Churches: Extravagance for God’s Sake?: Building for Celebration or Efficiency?

If holiness is beautiful, dare churches be drab?

The question before us, as I understand it, might be put like this: “What about splashy churches?” That is to say, ought the Christian church to pour enormous amounts of cash into erecting tremendous edifices to house its activities?

The question is not a new one. And before one has got through trying to arrange the issues that come crowding along the minute the question is asked, he has discovered that it opens out onto gigantic imponderables.

On the surface, the answer is clear. Indeed, it would hardly seem to admit of any discussion at all. Shall we build splashy churches? Of course not. Who do we think we are? Whom do we follow anyway? The pioneer of our faith never set about to upstage Nebuchadnezzar and Caesar. He never built so much as a lean-to for his followers, nor left any blueprint for such a structure. Let the pomps of Babylon and Rome memorialize themselves with golden images and arches of triumph, for they are all, precisely, Babylon and Rome. The pomps and triumphs of the kingdom of heaven are of such unlikely and unimpressive kinds as a girdle of camel’s hair and a colt, the foal of an ass. Fasting in the desert. No gold, nor silver, nor scrip, neither two coats, nor shoes, nor staves. A borrowed room upstairs; a borrowed grave. Come—why waste time even raising the question?

It seems to me that arguments against the proposal that we build big churches group themselves under at least four headings, although there are, no doubt, more than that. And underlying all of the four would be the whole prophetic biblical picture that would seem to rule out the enterprise to begin with. The headings under which we may group some of the arguments against our building huge and expensive churches would seem to be (perhaps on a rising scale of weightiness): taste, efficiency, imagery, and economics.

1. Taste. From a merely aesthetic and architectural point of view, what sort of harmony can we discern between what the Christian church is supposed to be and what these gigantic piles look like? Surely this is a basic principle of aesthetics, and hence of architecture: the thing you are making ought to answer somehow to its use. The form articulated in the stone or brick or concrete (the World Trade Center, the Whitney Museum, the Opera in Paris) should address exactly the idea at work in the enterprise. Let us leave on one side for the moment medieval cathedrals and abbeys. The question being put to us here is whether we ought to be building big churches. The twelfth-century achievement is a fait accompli, and hence beyond our immediate reach.

But what about the churches that are being built now? Anyone with semi-civilized taste would have to grimace at most of them: great, looming, sprawling “plants,” all landscaped and tricked out like suburban office parks. Alack! We perceive millions of dollars’ worth of bricks and ersatz-Colonial woodwork, bland and functional, all announcing, “Get a load of the size of this operation.” One wants to creep under the nearest cabbage leaf in sheer embarrassment.

But that is all a matter of taste. My point is simply to observe that the category of taste does, in fact, carry some possible arguments against building expensive churches. The fact that there are some churches being built here and there that might be candidates for genuine architectural immortality (Le Corbusier, for example) would carry us into later categories in this discussion. A corollary consideration, of course, still under this heading, is the awkward fact that we don’t seem able very often to achieve good taste either expensively or cheaply; we are as likely to erect a botch if we scrimp as if we lavish. And the final, obvious factor is that for any Christian, taste is a highly ambiguous business in any event, since it seems to be more or less irrelevant to the category “sanctity,” which is all that seems to matter when the chips are down—at least, if we take our cues from the prophets, the apostles, and the Lord’s teaching.

2. Efficiency. Look at all that gaping space standing vacant for six days out of every seven. Think of the fuel being pumped into the furnace just to keep the cavern at 50 degrees. And the classrooms! Who can justify all this?

Of course, some churches can respond that they are, in fact, using the space quite efficiently, and that countless meetings, both of parish and of community activities, occur all week long. Fair enough. The rejoinder to this often takes the form of a suggestion that homes and rented rooms about town might serve as well for most of what we house in these big plants. After all, the church is supposed to keep it simple. While I am not asked to settle that phase of the discussion, I suppose that if I were forced to take up a position here, I would want to raise the prior question of whether the church, locally, should ever be big. When you get 2,000 people in the assembly, is it still possible to live the corporate, disciplined, mutual, sacramental life that is the apostolic pattern, and which we have no choice but to follow?

3. Imagery. This category is, perhaps, almost indistinguishable from the first category of taste. It seems to me, however, that there is a different nuance here, beyond the merely immediate business of some congregation’s erecting of an immensity that signals “Money! Success! Great fund raising techniques!” to the local populace. We address rather the whole question of the image of what the church is in history. Shall we have a pilgrim imagery, or a triumphalist imagery? Do we want to herald Christ as reigning gloriously over all the works of man, or as kneeling with a towel? Do we hail human imagination with Annunciation, Transfiguration, and Ascension in what we build, or with kenosis, Nazareth, and Golgotha? Shall it be the prince St. Vladimir, or St. Francis? Shall it be the rich Joseph of Arimathea, or Martha of Bethany? Michael the Archangel or Mother Teresa?

At this point, many Christians may want to shout, Wait! We can’t quite separate all that out. There must be some paradoxes there: Christ’s majesty and his humility; Christ as conqueror and as servant; the church as glorious and as pilgrim; the gospel as both the fulfillment and the antithesis of human aspiration; both gold and sackcloth as images that must be kept alive; the feast table that is also an altar; the sword and the healing hands; sceptre and towel; terror and comfort. We have a jumble of contradictions—all symbolizing the paradoxes roused by the appearance of the ineffable in the middle of our ordinariness.

But I am ahead of my argument. Here I would point out that there is an argument that proceeds from the problem of imagery. For what exactly does the church wish to signal, if anything at all, in its buildings? Christians in Chartres, Bec, and Amiens, had one idea. The First Church in Americasville that has just finished its $3 million plant has another. And Christians meeting upstairs in a rented Elks hall in Altoona have yet another.

4. Economics. What we mean is biblical economics. How on earth can we justify vast sums of money when half the world is starving? The equation is outrageous. Have we never read the prophets? Who among us wants to be found at Dives’s table in this era of widespread poverty? But, alas, all of us sojourners in America are at Dives’s table, strip down as we will.

Can we not, then, conclude that the case is clear? In the light of such considerations, is there any doubt about the answer we should give to the question of erecting opulent church buildings? It would seem not. If taste, efficiency, imagery, and economics mean anything, then it would appear that the pouring of immense sums into church buildings is at least grotesquely inappropriate, if not immoral, in this age.

But we cannot quite leave it at that. There are at least two matters left dangling if we close off the discussion here.

First, there is the vexed question of what sum we should arrive at as a “Christian” ceiling for church building expenditure. If it is granted at all that there should be a roof over the heads of God’s gathered people, and if all of them are not to meet forever in borrowed Elks halls, then how much shall we allot as a permissible per capita (or per communicant) outlay? Immediately, we meet a dozen sliding factors such as size of congregation, geographical location, labor costs, material costs, inflation, depression, desired durability of structure (grass? wood? adobe?), appropriateness to local culture (is it rural Idaho, urban Zaire, or suburban Mexico City we are talking about?), demands of the ministries carried on by the congregation in question, and willingness of the Christians to contribute offerings for the structure. Unless we grip things in some doctrinaire and bureaucratic headlock in the interest of Christian “economics,” we will all hesitate to come up with a maximum or a minimum figure. Who knows what is appropriate?

From our editorial desks it is easy to pontificate about how Christians all over the world are to budget their money. But then we stumble into a culture somewhere whose whole vision of what is supremely precious knocks into a cocked hat those ferocious prescriptions we thought we were inferring so precisely from prophetic biblical texts. Any reflective Christian would wish to receive hesitantly those shrill encyclicals handed out as “biblical” from theorists who claim to have found the right formula.

It is awkward, of course, that neither the Lord nor the apostles ventured to hammer out an economic system. What was surely needed was the overthrow of the “system” under which humanity then staggered—as avaricious and unjust a system as any modern Marxist or capitalist has devised. But they seemed rather to appeal to prior principles—don’t be greedy, give extravagantly, care for the poor and oppressed—that would work themselves out visibly in the Christian community, as a sign in Rome and Babylon of the kingdom of heaven.

Which of us has a warrant to walk up to a church building, point the finger, and say, “That is a sin”? That is the sort of inquisitorial righteousness the Pharisees excelled in, for they knew what was wrong with everyone, and were prepared to assign guilt. How do I know, when I approach some painstakingly-made and exquisitely-crafted church building in Asia or Austria—or America—whether what I am looking at represents the pig-eyed egoism of some hard-sell preacher or the loving offering to God of the resources and labor of his people in this locale? My theories may shout one thing at me; I had better hold them tentatively and humbly.

I may think I know that the money in question should have been used for some other, more urgent purpose (and I must confess that most of the time I do think this). But one has to watch out when commenting on others’ offerings—spikenard, and that sort of thing.

This raises the second matter that must be stirred into our thinking before we close off the discussion. It is the mystery of the eternal in time; the mystery of the ineffable appearing in visible form. On this frontier we have awful paradoxes, and God deliver us from flattening them all out in the name of logic, pragmatism, economics, or even compassion. Here there will be things that defy our calculations. For example, there is a tabernacle made extravagantly, lavishly, wastefully even, of gold and acacia and fine-twined linen, for the inefficient purposes of the cult of a God named Yahweh. There were people who could have used those funds.

But here the objection may be raised that this is an old covenant item: everything has been superseded in the new. All that visible imagery is now brought to its fulfillment and enacted in the tabernacle of our flesh. It is charity of life, and not gold and acacia, that is to announce “holiness unto the Lord” now.

While this is true and taught in the epistle to the Hebrews, the whole thrust of the epistle—and indeed of the whole new covenant—surely drives us into deeper, not shallower channels. It does not end the offering of the works of our hands to Yahweh, but rather places these offerings in the greater context of charity. It is not mere gold I am after, says the Lord, it is your heart. Learn to love me above all, and your neighbor next. And then make your offerings. All of your work—your domestic routines, your professional duties, your skills and your crafts, your sculptures and dances and poetry, along with your limitations and your sufferings and your gold and silver—bring it all to me. For in the oblation of these you signal their redemption from the profanity that you brought on things by trying to seize them for your own in Eden, and you will herald the joyous return to the seamless goodness of Creation.

But how did we get from expensive churches to Eden and the hallowing of Creation? Was it not by reflecting on the mystery of the eternal in time? Heaven, in finding its way into our history, does not always do things the way our schemes might have thought it should. It calls us, for example, to feed the hungry—but then it asks us to bring lambs, bullocks, and doves to the altar, which is a waste of meat. Mary and Joseph could have put those poor turtle doves to much more obviously charitable uses. The woman with her costly ointment could have done better than to pour it out in a hysterical act of rhapsodic penitentiality and adoration. And, while the suggestion was made, it was silenced, and her waste was extolled and held up for the honor and emulation of all humanity forever.

The forerunner of the Messiah might have done better to preach insurrection against the system, since that, surely, was by far the worst evil abroad. But instead he, and the Messiah after him, called on everyone to be baptized. That is most impractical and futile business, unless it is acknowledged that the visible tokens and vehicles of the eternal will not always make sense on a pragmatic accounting. The kingdom of heaven does not come always and strictly in plausible economic terms. It may do so, to be sure. But it will escape even that category from time to time—in spilled spikenard (a waste), or in a bunch of yellow roses taken to a shut-in (why not feed the old woman?), or in a song composed and sung as an act of praise (no bread is buttered), or (even) in a church built truly and visibly ad majorem gloriam Dei.

If, therefore, we begin our thinking about immense, expensive churches on the reasonable plane of logic economics, we will arrive every time at the inevitable conclusion that no such structure ought ever to be built. The money can be put to better use; nay, it must be put to better use, as long as there is need in the world. But then we realize that, if we stick rigorously to this enormously plausible scheme, we have condemned at a stroke every single act of beauty ever offered in the wasteful business of worship. Bach ought to have been out helping others instead of cranking out endless cantatas. The workers of Chartres and Lincoln should have spent those generations doing something useful. Fra Angelico and van Eyck were indulging in a luxury while their neighbors’ needs went unheeded. Every potter, and every nun starching the fair linen, and every silversmith and glazier and seamstress making something exquisite and extravagant, and every singer and dancer and actor and trumpeter is condemned by our serene inquisition.

Will our fierce economics, or even our arithmetic of compassion, quite compass the whole mystery? May heaven keep us from insisting on spurious and destructive dichotomies. Charity will appear at one moment in the plain white habit of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, and the next in the brocaded chasuble of her priest; at one moment in the chapped hands of St. Francis and the next in the delicate hands of the illuminator; at one moment in the voice of the prophet crying “Woe!” to the rich and fat, and the next in the voice of the choirboy singing “Ecce quam bonum.”

It is all a jumble and a muddle, and none of it will fit. Which is perhaps our big clue. The drama of Love Incarnate is, precisely, a mystery, and you can’t come at mysteries with either calculators or economics.

G. Douglas Young is founder and president of the Institute of Holy Land Studies in Jerusalem. He has lived there since 1963.

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