Happy summer everyone!
While Brady and I were away on our vacation, we…well really, I…made sure to stop at every church, basilica, and cathedral along the way. We saw churches and former churches and monasteries in Spain, France, and Italy. Obviously, it’s a professional hazard of the job (being magnetically attracted to worship spaces) but I’ve always had a bit of a pet interest in church architecture.
I have to say that if I were to look at these buildings objectively as merely very old architectural marvels with their grand designs and beautiful and ornate appointments, I would say they are absolutely gorgeous structures.
But when I remember that these are churches…a building meant to be a clear symbol to the world about God’s presence…I am utterly appalled.
Maybe that doesn’t make sense for a minister to say. But honestly, I think it does.
When you consider the pure ostentatiousness of these structures and also consider how many of them were paid for and financed, you are left with a sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach.
Take for example Pisa, Italy. We all think about the famous “leaning tower” there. But did you know that this structure was merely a bell tower for the cathedral that sits in front of it? And that cathedral is huge. And so is the baptistry (a building only to be used for baptisms of the rich and famous) which sits about 50 yards across the square. The buildings are all ornate, well decorated, and took a lot of workers and a lot of time to build. And…a lot of money.
Big fancy, ornate churches make me scratch my head. When we spend all of that valuable capital on buildings, we’re not spending it on encouraging the flourishing of the human person. We’re not feeding, clothing, housing, or caring for those most vulnerable in society. Sure, we’re making a nice building. But God never told us to build huge buildings. In fact, if you check out II Samuel 7:1-17 it seems awfully clear that God never wanted the Temple to be built. We hear instead in the preaching of Jesus that our job as God’s people is to build God’s kingdom in the world…not our own.
It seems to me that huge buildings dedicated to the God who commands us over and over to care for the most vulnerable and even shows up in our midst in Jesus who carries out these actions of compassion and love is basically saying we know better than God and that our big buildings are the way to show the world the God we worship. And in that, we are right. When we spend humongous sums of money to show our wealth, power, and status, we are showing to the world that we worship those gods: greed, earthly principalities, and popularity. But we are also saying that we do not honestly worship the God made real in Jesus Christ who was a poor, simple, itinerant rabbi declaring the inbreaking of God’s kingdom of welcome, love, redemption, and peace.
I’ve heard the arguments: but the huge buildings help to show how big God is and to show our respect and help direct us to the heavens, etc. I can understand that…but couldn’t we also do that with an aggressive plan to feed, clothe, care for, re-home, find treatment for, etc.? Wouldn’t that be a bigger statement to the world rather than we can build huge structures?
When we were in St. Peter’s Square in Rome and steps away from what is considered by many one of the most recognized structures in all Christianity, I couldn’t help but notice the large volume of homeless, mentally ill, and addicted people laying on the steps and in the porticoes of the area. That basilica, dedicated to Almighty God, had no room for these most vulnerable of people. The tens (or hundreds) of millions of dollars spent to make fancy buildings and stuff them full of priceless works of art and decorate them to the nines…just seems like we’re not really taking Christ’s call to follow him all that seriously. To see lines and lines and lines of tourists who are paying to enter that supposedly holy structure and also to see the most vulnerable in society being ignored and overlooked by the same church charged with their care was very upsetting to me. Needless to say, we did not attempt to enter that place; I couldn’t square the morality of it my head for a second.
Even today, many modern churches are more like coliseums or concert venues. Millions and millions and millions of dollars go into the building, art work, signage, lights, sound, and visual effect system but I don’t see a lot of that money going outward to community care, feeding programs, or ensuring people can have their basic needs met. The “churches” look more like a venue for the latest pop concert, not a place to meet and worship Almighty God. One church, in fact, has a guide wire system so that the “pastor” can fly around the room. Like…seriously? That’s what we’re spending our money on?
When I see these things, I grieve. And I wonder: How many people could be fed from those millions? How many people could have their medical care paid for? How many people could have a house bought for them? How many kids could receive a high-quality education? How much poverty could we eradicate? How many systems could be built to allow people to become sustainable and not in need of hand-ups or having to rely on broken government programs for social aid? For example Joel Osteen “preaches” every week in a 16,800 seat former NBA arena. When floods were destroying lives and homes in Texas just a few years back, the church couldn’t be bothered to open itself as a shelter, or provide food or water, until enough public outcry was heard that from a PR standpoint they simply had to do something. Why wasn’t their first impulse to say, “What can we do? How can we serve God’s people? How can we be a beacon of hope?” These buildings both old and new, I fear, were never meant to be a symbol of God’s reign. Instead, they have been and are boondoggles of human ego, excess, and waste.
So we have to ask the question: How much larger could our Gospel proclamation be if we just put our money where our mouth is? People ask me all the time: What do you think of the downturn in Christianity (worship attendance, people claiming Christian faith, etc.)? Most of the time I see it as a natural progression of religion and society that has been playing out for centuries. There are ebbs and flows.
But on the other hand, I also see large monetary expenditures into physical plants and wonder if we’re not just turning people off completely. We tell people that we serve a compassionate, merciful God who wishes for God’s people to do God’s work of compassion and love. And we say it from incredibly large, ridiculously expensive wastes of money that should be invested into solving humanities most pressing issues.
We don’t need massive structures to worship God or proclaim God’s presence or show God’s work in us and through us. For me, I’ve always felt closer to God in simple worship spaces: an outdoor chapel with repurposed fallen logs as pews; the basic and stripped-down Church of the Reconciliation in the Taizé Community; a small, simple sanctuary with little decoration.
I often worry that we spend far too much on church buildings and not nearly enough on doing Christ’s work. Our priorities are all skewed.
From what I have learned over the years about church architecture and construction, a lot of the big monoliths were built at a time when the church was vying for authority against the civil authority and the way to demonstrate this was to show just how big of a building each could build; an architectural contest. And victims caught in the middle, as they always are, were the sick, poor, hungry, and dying.
And today, while I don’t think the motivations are the same, we are still trying to keep up with society and its limited attention span and need for flashy, quick, and fun. We’ve made church into entertainment without substance. We focus so much on having the right lighting and sound and music and “feeling good” that we miss the very point of our faith: to be loved and to love in return the God who created us and gave us life and set us on the path to do God’s holy work. And this is the simplicity of faith: to give and share God’s love.
And for that, we don’t need massive physical structures. We don’t need to pour millions and billions into buildings.
Instead, we need to put our money where our mouth is and proclaim the Gospel in word and action in the world. This is what Christ asked of us. And it’s really rather simple.