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?

Clarity

OK, here's an example of what I was talking about in the last posting.

Consider this great sentence from Walter Brueggemann about 1 and 2 Chronicles:
"in the context of Persia as a dependent colony of the empire, Judaism's only chance for freedom of thought, faith and action is through the maintenance of a liturgical practice and sensibility.... [Chronicles] shows Israel as a choir that sings its way through historical crisis." (Introduction to the Old Testament, 375, 376.)

Contemporary Protestants tend to sneer at Chronicles because its lack of prophetic passion and concern for justice. It's all about Levites and singers. Brueggemann is arguing that it was the Jewish ability to maintain a clear focus in the midst of adverse circumstances (colonization, marginalization) that ensured their survival and thriving.

The anxiety of discontinuous change has caused many churches to react by trying to assimilate (or be assimilated by) the surrounding culture in the hopes that it will create a kind of marketable relevance. In so doing, churches will tend to neglect the very things that give them their identity and staying power -- including worship. Worship is exploited to serve ulterior ends, like attracting the disaffected back to the pews (itself fraught with ulterior motives, like, "And then they can help pay the bills"!)

In the much maligned Books of Chronicles, maybe there's a bit of a template for how to deal with a hostile and indifferent culture. Sing! Worship! Be the church!

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?