Transparency

Rabbi Andy Bachman has posted a recent sermon on the "transparent synagogue" on his blog, www.andybachman.com. The post was on October 8. You'll see the link to the left.

I think he and Dan are onto something here. Whether a building acts as a wall or a window depends, not on its architecture, but on the transparency of the community inside. The problem, of course, is not the buildings, and it will not be corrected by constructing big glass foyers. The problem is that the communities inside the buildings have allowed themselves to become opaque.

I plan to do some serious reflecting on this quality of transparency, what it means and how it is to be lived. Any thoughts out there?

Buildings and Visibility Part II

Back in May I shared some of my thoughts about church buildings and how they might actually serve to make the church invisible in today's culture. There are days when I wish we didn't have to struggle with the upkeep of not one but two buildings (we still haven't succeeded in selling the First United Church building four years after an amalgamation.) About 10 years ago a mischievous kid set fire to an outdoor shed, destroyed our lawnmower and scorched the roof of our gym. The problem was he did it at 7:30 p.m. when all the seniors next door were looking out their windows. More than once we've joked that we should find him, pay him $50 and ask him to come back and finish what he started!

But, as with almost everything, buildings are neither pro- nor anti-Gospel in and of themselves. Here's a much needed and balancing perspective from my good friend Dan Meeter of Old First Reformed Church in Brooklyn, NY.

[A church planting colleague] suggested that my congregation might grow much better if we sold our church building and started renting space in a local public school. Well, he's not [entirely] wrong…..But I think my colleague is wrong in the narrowness of his judgments. Our church building is part of our identity. Not just in the sociological sense that "we shape our buildings, thereafter they shape us," as Churchill said. But theologically our building is part of us, because we believe it is part of the Holy Spirit's work with us and our mission, and for better or worse, our building is the concrete expression of our tradition…. We take our general mission to be a "community of Jesus" for God and for our neighbors. But consciously choosing to be stewards of our historic Reformed church, including our building, is one of the particular missions we have committed to, including such other things as education, music, fellowship, sanctuary, and hospitality. We recognize that our building is a very visible and concrete expression of the institution and tradition to which we voluntarily commit.
…to sell our building strikes me as a repudiation of the work of the Holy Spirit among real people in real time. For, at least according the Apostles Creed, the first work of the Holy Spirit is the holy catholic Church. Under "catholic" I include the realities of the church in time, and by "forgiveness of sins" I include learning to love even our difficult building, and by "communion of the saints" I include the concrete (literally) witness of former generations of our congregation, and by "resurrection of the body" I include the physicality of the world.

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?