12 Brief Thoughts on Church Buildings

1. The church is not a building but a people—but the church is a people who must gather. Thus, for a church to exist, it must have a location to gather in. And since meeting outdoors limits the gathering (weather, sound, distractions, etc.), this usually means some kind of building. More pragmatically, as many young church plants can testify, often the wider community won’t take you very seriously until you have a building to meet in.
2. The health of a church is not necessarily connected with the quality of its building. A healthy, growing church can meet in a basement, and a dead, apostate church can gather (as many do) in ornate cathedrals.
3. Conversely, beauty and artful design are not inherently signs of compromise; simplicity and frugality are not necessarily signs of maturity. Heretics can sit in metal-folding chairs; saints can sit in hand-carved pews.
4. The kind of building will be determined by the size of the congregation (how much space do we need?), and financial standing of the church (what kind of building can we afford?). In the New Testament, churches would sometimes meet in someone’s home (Rom 16:5), and sometimes in larger facilities, like the Hall of Tyrannus (Acts 19:9-10). The church in Jerusalem (prior to the martyrdom of Stephen) was in the thousands and so gathered regularly in the Temple court (Acts 2:41-47). As Christianity began to grow, churches began constructing buildings devoted exclusively to their church gatherings. The Bible does not dictate how big (or small) a church must be and therefore does not dictate how large or modest a church building should be.
5. A church should never jeopardize its ministry by over-extending itself financially to build. The church that has to fire their pastor to pay for their building renovation has made a foolish bargain. The Bible says nothing about the kind of building a church gathers in, but the New Testament has lots to say about how we are to financially support the teachers of the church (1 Tim 5:17-18; 1 Cor 9:6-12), missionary work (1 Cor 16:5-11), and ministries of benevolence (2 Cor 8-9).
6. The most important event in the church is the Sunday gathering, and the most important part of the gathering is the preaching of God’s Word. Faith comes by hearing…not by beautiful spaces, not by liturgies, not by music, not even by prayer or sacraments (Rom 10:17). Thus, whatever architectural or aesthetic designs are made, they must never hinder or come at the expense of the audible and central proclamation of the gospel. This also means that if a church must prioritize any part of its building, it should be the sanctuary.
7. Evangelicals tend to not think much about a church’s architecture and aesthetic beyond purely functional questions. It may be tempting for evangelicals to roll their eyes at Christians of yesteryear who invested enormous sums of money in making stone cathedrals, Think of all the good they could have done with that money? But it is an extreme hermeneutic of suspicion to assume that every beautiful church was constructed through avarice and worldliness. (Disregard the fact that these same evangelicals may not think twice about their church spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on A/V equipment). Buildings are expensive, but they also are investments that can bless the kingdom of God for generations to come. If we spend money to make our homes, our parks, our hospitals, our hotel lobbies into beautiful places, why would we not (at a bare minimum) do the same in our places of worship? What does a community and culture communicate about their values if their college campuses are extravagant while all of their churches are impoverished? If Christians of previous generations built beautiful cathedrals, it is possible that this was an unwise stewarding of resources. Or, one could argue that if there was any place to make beautiful and sublime, it would be the place where we gather to “behold the King in His beauty” (Isa 33:17).
8. Human beings are embodied creatures, which means that we are not exclusively driven by raw information. We are not brains on sticks that only need to download data to arrive at conclusions. We are also affected by our environment. The nature of the space you are in will affect your experience in that space. If you eat a delicious meal that has been plated artistically in a restaurant with tasteful ambiance, you will find yourself enjoying the meal significantly more than if you had eaten the same food in your car in a to-go box. You will find it easier to contemplate the glory of God standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon than you will in the flourescently-lit DMV. It isn’t because God is more present at the Grand Canyon, but it is because we are creatures who are easily affected by our surroundings. The ornate and costly designs of the Tabernacle and Temple were not to draw God to the location, like iron-filings to a magnet. They were there to help orient the worshipper as he approached the fearful God. The gold, the designs, the sheer size of the structure—all were used as aids in helping the worshipper discern the holiness and beauty of the God he had come to worship. Thus, our surroundings can either aid, or hinder, our worship.Immanuel Baptist Church, Louisville
9. A church should create a space for corporate worship that emphasizes—rather than detracts from—the central point of worship: God. This will look different in different contexts and will be limited by what the congregation can afford and deems is wise. The goal should be that when a guest or congregant walks into the sanctuary they realize that they have entered a place unlike any other space in the hustle and bustle of normal life. They have come somewhere that leads them to reverent silence and contemplation as they prepare to commune with the living God (Eccl 5:1-7). This is generally why churches have been built with vaulted ceilings (to draw your eyes heavenward and make you feel small), contain Christian symbols and art (to remind you of the ancient faith you are participating in), and have avoided elements that make the sanctuary feel trivial or profane. This doesn’t require frescoes and Corinthian columns. Neil Postman explains:Almost any place will do, provided it is first decontaminated; that is, divested of its profane uses. This can be done by placing a cross on a wall, or candles on a table, or a sacred document in public view. Through such acts, a gymnasium or dining hall or hotel room can be transformed into a place of worship; a slice of space-time can be removed from the world of profane events, and be recreated into a reality that does not belong to our world. – Amusing Ourselves to Death, p. 101-02
10. I believe it was Bob Kauflin who coined the phrase “non-distracting excellence” when describing the needed skill for musicians who are playing on a Sunday morning. This is the aim of what a church building should strive for. Distractions could come from a sanctuary being shabby or ugly, or in being opulent and extravagant. A simple elegance that doesn’t draw undo attention to itself, but reminds the worshipper of the historic faith they are participating in and the exalted God they have come to worship, is the goal.
11. The seeker-sensitive movement pushed hard against the traditional design of the church in favor of a church building that looked more like a shopping mall or college campus or movie theater. Sometimes, those decisions were made out of financial limitations (see point 4 and 5), but other times they were intentional. The thinking goes: if we want to reach the modern person today, we need to make the space more familiar to them, less austere and other-worldly. But this is truly bizarre when you consider it. David Wells, in his excellent work Above All Earthly Pow’rs, explains:This is probably the first time…that churchgoers have wanted their buildings to be mistaken for corporate headquarters or country clubs.
    This is no small development, for church buildings, in pedantic or grand ways, have always tried to express the fact visually that these are places of Christian presence and places where God in all his greatness is worshipped. Their architecture and their symbols have pointed back to what happened at the Cross and in the Resurrection. Churches are a reminder of the pilgrim status of the people of God as they journey toward a different land…This is why, in the past, churches have wanted to be visually different from corporate headquarters and country clubs whose purposes are, by contrast, thoroughly this-worldly. They have wanted to reflect this other Story rather than to disguise themselves as something else. – pg. 282
12. One of my favorite apologetic arguments to use with non-believers is the argument from aesthetic experience (see Peter Kreeft’s short explanation of that here, but applied specifically to Catholicism). Creating beautiful places of worship helps bring that argument into the analog world of experience at the most important of locations: the church. One of the reasons that many young evangelicals today are converting to Catholicism—and specifically traditional Catholicism—is because the institutions of Rome and its esoteric liturgy convey the grandeur, antiquity, and majesty that modernity has lost. A stone cathedral is the apotheosis of this grandeur. In contrast, the window-less mega-church “worship centers” are emblematic of the commercialization and triviality of the modern church experience as a whole. Young people are hungry for a serious, ancient faith that does not pander to the spirit of the age, but carries its own gravity and awe.Tenth Presbyterian Church, Philadelphia

In sum, this will look different in specific contexts and cultures, and will always depend on what a church can afford without compromising its ministry. But American evangelicals today should think about what their church building is communicating and whether or not it is currently emphasizing, or detracting, from the primary object of our worship: God.