Pagan Christianity: The Church Building
By Fred | Friday, June 25, 2010
The Argument
The first subject that the book addresses is the church building. The basic premise here is sound: the church is not a building. The church is people. It took a few hundred years for church buildings to be built. Christians met in homes. Viola and Barna’s conclusion is that church buildings shouldn’t exist. Christians should still meet in homes.
Two things are in their favour:
1) People mistake the building for the church. I am going “to church.” Don’t dress/act/talk like that “in the house of God” (meaning, completely erroneously, in the “church building”). The Bible specifically says that God doesn’t live in buildings. This became clear in the New Testament when God’s statement about himself became a profound reality. Every time we refer to a building as the “house of God,” we are propagating an error.
2) A large amount of resources go into church buildings—mortgage, utilities, etc. Furthermore, the actual structures themselves have evolved to emphasize teachings that are, in some cases, not necessarily biblical, and in other cases, directly contradictory to what the Bible teaches. Buildings were (and still are) designed to evoke specific atmosphere which, at worst, could be called a manipulation of emotions. For many years, the pulpit was elevated—not for visibility but to physically elevate the preacher to emphasize either the supremacy of the message or the supremacy of the person speaking.
Aesthetic Implications
And so Viola and Barna trace specific design features (including stained glass and steeples) to “pagan” origins. As the previous blog post mentioned, sometimes these influences are pagan (meaning “polytheistic”). Other times, though, the influence is cultural. Ironically, they point out the difference between architecture inspired by Greeks (“pagan polytheists”), which emphasized democracy, and equality with architecture inspired by Babylonians and Egyptians (also “pagan polytheists”), which emphasized straining towards heaven (pp. 31-32). It would seem that any building would be wrong. Ironically, this directly leads to Viola’s presupposition—that “the church” only meets in homes.
How Big?
I would suggest something different: the church, at whatever stage in history and in whatever culture, met in homes and in whatever was the largest space available. There is every reason to believe that the first Christians, all Jews, met at the Temple (see Acts 2, which doesn’t support the traditional view of the apostles being in the “upper room”—they were probably in the Temple where any practicing Jew would celebrate Pentecost, and where their praise in different languages was audible to everyone around them). Even when they were in the “upper room,” this was a place where 120 people could fit! When the early church met in homes, they met in the largest home available. It’s a rare home today that could fit 120 people today.
My contention is that a healthy “church” (i.e., group of believers) is healthy when they meet in large groups and in smaller groups. This does seem to be the biblical model, regardless of the contentions of Viola and Barna.
Finally, the issue of overhead. Yes, buildings cost a lot of money. There may be other options, e.g., renting a community center (if available) for that “large gathering.” For our church in particular, the hand of God was clearly part of the acquisition of the building we own. Is there large overhead? Yes. Less than the regular rental of a community center? It absolutely can be. We used to rent. We now own. We pay a bit more to have a building seven days a week than we used to to rent one for a few hours a week.
I believe the church meets together for three purposes: to worship, to learn, and to have relationship (including encouragement, accountability, etc.). Viola and Barna make the point that relationship does not work well in church buildings (i.e., when everyone is sitting facing the same direction). They’re right. But corporate worship works better in a large setting. They would argue against that, but we’ll deal with that when we get to it. Learning works well for some people in a small group setting. Others learn better in a large group setting (like the biblical group of 120). I see the value of the small group and the large group. Viola and Barna only see the value of the small group.
The point is that here Viola and Barna are dominated by their presupposition that church meeting in homes “is the way to do it.” They ignore that large group meeting. Even though it was done in the Bible, they choose to focus on their own agenda: home church. Cultures change. We have homes that do not fit 120 people. What are the other options? A church building is one. As long as the church building is kept in its proper place, i.e., a “building where the church meets,” there is nothing wrong with a church building. In fact, there can be something very right about it.
Category: Stuff