Buildings and Visibility

(For the record, that's not my church. It's Eastminster United in Toronto, but it conveys the appropriate image.)

Last week we had a meeting to discuss expanding and repaving part of our parking lot. There was only one estimate -- but it was $75,000! I had this momentary feeling of being overwhelmed by the reality of trying to keep a church building in half decent repair. For many churches with older physical plants, it will soon become unmanageable -- for many, it already has.

Many congregations are crossing a line which is transforming their buildings from assets to liabilities. Which is hard to deal with, because most of us would have trouble even imagining what a church could be apart from the building. The multi-facility church structure is woven into our understanding of the church at a very deep level.

But there's another aspect to this. Time was -- and not very long ago -- that a fine church building translated into visibility. That's why churches sprouted like mushrooms in the post-War era. A church building with a steeple and stained glass windows meant that people could see where the church was.

But that was in the days when the boundaries between church and culture were permeable and the two realms reinforced each other -- culture underwriting and confirming the church's message, church blessing the values of culture.

Today, buildings can actually inhibit visibility. People drive by and they are not drawn in to the comforting and the familiar. Rather, they are more likely to see the bricks and mortar of the church as a wall behind which strange and unfamiliar things go on -- things that they have no reason to believe are of the slightest relevance to them.

What should we do? It's not an easy question. For one thing, we can't just walk away from our buildings, even if nobody else wants them. And for another, our buildings are so much a part of identity, we cannot think of ourselves apart from them.

But what if we're getting to the point where we really can't afford them, both in terms of dollars and cents, and in terms of our missional relationship with a post-Christian culture?