This Sunday, Donald preached from Acts and Matthew discussing the pros and cons of the Church of Scotland owning property.
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Acts 17:22-31; Matthew 5:13-16
Building the Church
I wasn’t at this year’s General Assembly of the Church of Scotland.
But I’ve heard what the main news was: the Kirk is in financial crisis. If we continue with the same number of ministers, we will run out of reserves in about 6 years time. We pay more out than is coming in.
The decision taken was to cut the number of ministers – what that means locally is that we can expect to lose the equivalent of 2 full-time posts in St Andrews Presbytery.
I gather that some speakers at the Assembly said that the wrong thing was being targeted for cuts. Don’t cut the ministers – sell the surplus buildings. Indeed, in an editorial in last month’s Life and Work, we read: the Church still has responsibility for far too many buildings.
Indeed, between St Monans and Largoward Church alone, we have 4.
The call from many who advocate selling off the buildings is Back to the Bible. The early church did not have buildings, and look how they grew.
This is true. Partly it was because the church was so new. This new way of faith, following Jesus Christ, was so new that there hadn’t been time to build buildings; there wasn’t the money for buildings when there were so many more obvious needs – the care of widows, the spreading of the faith through missionaries such as Paul.
In my own life, I used to worship in Bridge of Don Baptist Church, which for its early years rented the dinner hall at Oldmachar Academy.
But there was, I think, a deeper reason against building buildings for worshipping Jesus Christ, and we hear it in Paul’s sermon in Athens in Acts 17.
v. 24: The God who created the world and everything in it, and who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands.
The sermon goes on to explore how God is not an idol: Being God’s offspring, then, we ought not to suppose that the deity is like an image in gold or silver or stone, shaped by human craftsmanship and design.
In other words, Paul as a good Jew, knew that God was different from those gods found in statues, the golden calf or Baal or Astarte or any other physical statue-god. The true God is Spirit, and cannot be confined to any space.
I think this applies not only to statues but to buildings. Of course, Paul went to the synagogue to preach wherever he went, but fundamentally he knew that God was not found only in that building, but could be worshipped anywhere. So the early church worshipped in people’s houses. The book of Acts is a book of the Apostles, of Paul, of the Holy Spirit – it is a book of characters, not of buildings. The church is the people, the body of Christ, built up by the Spirit.
Yet once the buildings are there, perhaps we fall into the trap that Paul worried about.
A story about a primary school class visiting local church.
Home – told grandmother:
We went into God’s house today – it was great!
– Did you see God?
– No – but I saw his wife hoovering the carpet.
Actually – here, cleaner man, perhaps would have seen God.
And we do become very attached to our church buildings.
This is the place we came to Sunday School, where we came at Christmas and Easter, where we grew in faith and joined the church, where we were married, our children baptised, where we felt increasingly at home spiritually, where we came weekly to encounter God, to take time from our busy lives, to listen, to pray, to sing in praise of God.
Our faith becomes mingled with a certain place, its shape, its atmosphere, its smell, its memories – especially if we live a long time in one place.
You could say that our faith in God and our love for our church building become mingled, part of the same Christian life.
Victor Hugo, who wrote Les Miserables – the book, not the music – said, bluntly, A Church is God between four walls.
And for many, that is not far from the truth.
John Calvin, on his commentary on this passage of Acts, puts it rather well: People, being earthy, want something like them. In their boldness they make God in a way they can understand.
IOW we are physical creatures, with material bodies, part of the earth, and so even when it comes to God and worshipping God, we prefer material, earthy things – statues, idols, stained glass, pews, buildings – to going without.
However, hear what Calvin says next: Thus true knowledge of God is turned into a lie. If we do not ascend high above the world, we see only empty shadows and ghosts instead of God.
A Church may be God between 4 walls for some people, but if that is all God is for us, it’s a pale, narrow, inward-looking faith due ultimately to crumble into dust.
So what should be our attitude to church buildings. It may well be that the Church of Scotland has too many: how often in small Scottish towns do we find separate church buildings on the same high street, each a quarter full at best on a Sunday, with large paper memberships who only appear at meetings to vote to keep open a church they won’t go to except in a box.
But just because there are too many does not mean that we should not have buildings at all. For the right building is a blessing to God’s people.
A good church building should be beautiful – lifting our earthy human spirits from the physical stone and slate to the heights of heaven, feeling the invisible God in the visible walls, sensing the listening God in the echoes of our prayers, seeing the light of God through our own restored windows.
A good church building should be practical, genuinely offering something unique and useful to the community. It should adapt to contemporary needs, without sacrificing beauty or the sense of worship.
A good church building should be well-maintained. What does it say for our faith if we cannot look after the building which represents our faith in the community, which speaks of our confidence in the grace of God? A shabby, dirty, unloved church building says we’ve stopped caring.
And a good church building is part of our faith.
The handbook of Scotland’s Churches Scheme, of which we are a member, says this:
Love of buildings is an expression of love of God and of neighbour… Buildings as places in which to give and receive hospitality and spiritual support are deeply embedded in the human psyche.
I would agree: this is a building we can love – as an expression of love for God and neighbour.
The difficult balance is in not worshipping the building – against that Paul, and Calvin, and many voices in today’s Church of Scotland are right.
The church is an aid to worshipping God for earthy people.
And more, the church building as well as its people, is a witness to God.
The church building, its steeple poking up above a community, its services attractive to all, its doors open to visitors, is like that light set on a lampstand which Jesus described, where it gives light to everyone in the house.
Having such a lovely light – in this church – can and should inspire us to be as lovely and light-giving in our lives,
shedding the light of God in our homes, community, workplace,
so that all may give praise to our Father in heaven.
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