I have a besetting sin: in my mind, I undress almost every church building I enter. Then I remake it. If this wall was removed, I think, and a row of windows cut into that wall, and the room expanded in this direction, and different flooring installed, this whole building would be … and here are my watchwords: more useful, and more beautiful.
It’s a vice I acquired in childhood. My mother constantly changed the appearance of rooms: moved furniture like it was a dollhouse, changed sofa covers like they were bed sheets, shuffled and reshuffled paintings and ornaments kaleidoscopically. I’d leave for school in the morning and the living room suited a Manhattan penthouse; I’d return in the afternoon and it resembled a San Francisco flop house.
This drove my father crazy and secretly thrilled me.
The vice has been extravagantly indulged over the past 14 years with my church. Five years before I got here, the church acquired a farm house on four acres, with chickens bobbing about, apple trees scattered here and there, a perimeter thick and thorny with blackberry shrubs. We’ve renovated continuously ever since and done three major additions. The farmhouse still stands. It houses most of our offices. But it is unrecognizable, inside or out, from the few photos we have of it when we bought it. We’ve built onto this, in successive stages, more offices, many class rooms, a chapel, a large sanctuary, a wide foyer, a commercial kitchen, and so on. Besides all this, we have a retired contractor who spends a good part of his week fixing and patching and who, on a steady basis, and usually on some whim of mine, does the prophetic work of “tearing down and building up,” only with plaster and wood and the like. Besides all that, we have many artists always making new paintings and mosaics and banners to hang on our walls.
My justification for all this falls under my watchwords. We’re making the place more useful and more beautiful. Church facilities are both ministry tool and holy ground—multi-use sacred space. That’s my conviction. So I preach, unapologetically, my creed. Greater beauty, greater usefulness.
Yes and amen.
Only, I’m rethinking some of my premises about premises.
Our pastors and elders recently visited a church in Vancouver. I did what I typically do when I enter a church building—started undressing it in my mind, then giving it a full-body makeover. We met for the first hour in a room with scuffed walls, worn floor, dingy paint. We sat on wood chairs—the kind schools roll out in teetering stacks for assemblies in the gym, or at least did in my day. My imagination was working at fever pitch. I conjured that whole building spanking new and sparkling bright in less than half an hour.
But I was also listening. The pastor described to us their neighborhood—a bouillabaisse of cultures, ethnic and otherwise. Compressed within a few city blocks is an urban colony of artists, merchants, beggars, buskers, drug dealers, street people, gays, lesbians, and virtually every tribe and tongue and nation.
And in the middle, a church.
The pastor described to us the ways they use their limited resources to incarnate the gospel. He told us stories of the difference that’s making. Then he walked us around the neighborhood and showed us houses the church owned or rented so that people could live semi-communally. This way, they had affordable housing and were taught the ways of Christ within the context of community. He showed us the house where they operated a ministry of healing prayer—many of the people who come to their church show up profoundly broken. We toured the medieval bowels of the church building, where among the ancient furnace and low bare ceiling and bare concrete floor they’ve established a pottery studio. Here, a master potter teaches former street people the art of making earthenware. They fill orders from around the world.
The building meets neither of my touchstones. It’s not very useful. It’s not at all beautiful. Everything is makeshift, rigged up, cobbled together. Yet here, in this old, cluttered building amid this wild, broken neighborhood, the kingdom of God flourishes.
“Unless the Lord builds the house,” Psalm 127 says, “its builders labor in vain.” Given the option, I’d still prefer our building to be useful and beautiful. But unless God is in the house, all the beauty and usefulness in the world is just a whitewashed tomb.
Mark Buchanan is pastor of New Life Community church in Duncan, British Columbia, and a contributing editor of Leadership.
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