Can a church get so attached to its building that it ceases to be the church?
I live in an area where there are six united churches in close proximity – Northminster, Lansing, Newtonbrook, Willowdale, Oriole–York Mills, & Forest Grove – all part of what was known as Don Valley Presbytery in north central Toronto. There was a seventh church, Hillcrest, but it closed. All these churches were founded in the late ’50′s/early ’60′s when there was a boom in Christianity that had caught the wave of post–war optimism. Young families were settling in the suburbs. At that time, Canada’s religious and cultural make–up was more homogeneous, which made it easier to rationalize ourselves as basically Christian with a few aberrations. But things have changed. Membership in suburban churches is down, both because interest in Christianity is waning and because an influx of new Canadians has radically altered who we are as a people. Now, it would be irresponsible to describe ourselves as basically Christian.
There are people who lament these changes. There are people who drift into a hazy nostalgia for the good old days when sunday schools were bursting at the seams. Their nostalgia seems to ignore the exciting possibilities that might come from the emergence of a rich and diverse culture. I would suggest that such laments reflect more than simple grieving for lost days gone by; they reflect a subtle arrogance. When our sunday schools were bursting at the seams, we were filled with a fervour to Christianize the world. That was an imperial fantasy which has also reared its head as Reaganomics and the “Star Wars” missile defense system, and now has transmogrified itself into Bush’s military machine whose greatest accomplishment is 650,000 Iraqi civilian casualties. This is church writ large in today’s world. There is no moral footing for our lamentations.
Increasingly, the local churches have assumed for themselves ministries of property management. To generate enough revenue to maintain large buildings, they either redevelop, or they lease to well–paying tenants. And so Oriole–York Mills has leased property for the development of an Alzeimer’s Unit. Northminster leases its Christian Education wing to the city for a public daycare, the sanctuary to two other congregations, and it has a residential lease for the manse property. But are these valid ministries? Have these communities been called, or has the bottom line dictated how their energies should be applied? It is not for me to judge. However, I do observe that when discussions were held regarding pooling of resources, Oriole–York Mills did not attend. Having just entered into a lucrative lease, perhaps that church no longer has any incentive to engage in such a conversation. But I can see it from the Oriole–York Mills point of view, too.
I have recently seen a shift of my own commitments to a church in Scarborough Presbytery, a suburban collection of twenty–one united churches with issues similar to those I’ve encountered in my home community. There, a different approach has been proposed. The presbytery is exploring the development of a regional church model so that many smaller congregations, increasingly burdened by properties they cannot afford to maintain, would pool resources to support a different kind of ministry. Considered in abstraction, this is precisely what needs to be done. If twenty–one churches each have to allocate, say, five people to the task of property maintenance and management, then that means that across the presbytery, 105 people are changing light bulbs, and negotiating with karate clubs and painting ceilings. That’s a lot of people who might otherwise be available to minister in other ways. A regional church could well free up many of those people so that they might give of their time, for example, as pastoral visitors, leaders or participants in study groups and social groups, as promoters of social justice issues. A regional church could leverage opportunities for more fulfilling ministry. It also would allow the presbytery to free up capital to support this other work.
However, like the people at Oriole–York Mills, I find myself resistant to the idea of entering into conversation about pooling resources. I have aligned myself with a congregation whose ministry and identity are distinctive. It is a community which has immersed itself, perhaps passionately, in a specific view of what it means to live in the world and aims to use itself as a model, or even as a laboratory, to work that out. If that congregation were to become part of a larger entity, the particularity of its own identity would probably disappear. Indeed, how it does church is antithetical to the ways of other congregations within the presbytery, so it would most certainly become subsumed within a watered–down version of “living as church in the world.” Certainly, for someone like me who targeted a specific church and commutes from some distance, the shift to a regional model would mark the end of my involvement. However, my situation is atypical.
Perhaps, between the regional and community models of church lies a third way. (There are many other ways, of course, but only one which is sufficiently distinct to concern me here). The other alternative comes from reflection upon what it means to be church.
Certainly, in scripture, there is little notion of church as building. I don’t find scripture particularly authoritative of anything, but offer these words as a kind of prophylactic against the criticisms of those who do. The greek word most often associated with church is ekklesia, which refers to an assembly or gathering of people. Another word that has come to be associated with buildings is basileia, which refers to the reign or kingdom of god. In its liberationist understanding, it is the implementation of a just order, of a living in right relationship, right here, right now. Neither concept has much to do with property committees.
To make things more concrete, consider the story of the widow’s mite, which is often suggested as a resource during stewardship campaigns: let us not restrict our giving to our abundance, but give, like the widow, from our need. This is from Luke 21:1–4. Unfortunately, the next two verses often go overlooked. “When some were speaking about the temple, how it was adorned with beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God, he said, ‘As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.’” We know that in 70 C.E. the Romans marched on Jerusalem and ground the temple to dust. We are not meant to celebrate the widow’s generosity; we are called to lament the fact that she impoverished herself for the sake of something useless. We come together, not for the sake of bricks and clean carpets, but for the sake of ideas, for the discerning of convictions, for the sharing of an intimation of the divine in our midst. This is ekklesia and bears within it the possibility of basileia. As such, it requires no buildings. Perhaps church would be better as house church, in the manner of the Corinthians and Ephesians of Paul’s day, where church quickened in the intimate conversations amongst everyday people of the first century.
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January 28th, 2010 at 5:46 pm
This is fascinating. I’m printing it off for someone who doesn’t have a computer.