It's just a building. . .

For a very long time we have accepted as truth the idea that the first Christians did not have an idea of sacred space, that multi-purpose space was the norm, and that the nature of what happened in the liturgy and what happened at a family meal were more similar than distinct.  The myth has given birth to a liturgical theology and an architecture which has predominated in modern times and it has entrenched itself so deeply that nearly every ecclesiastical ideology accepts it.  Simple is not merely a preference for the eye or the ear but that which was from the beginning until an alien view of space and function corrupted the earlier pristine work.

Nowhere is this more practiced than with the use of church buildings no longer needed or wanted.  We say a few words and the sell to the highest bidder the space where people once gathered to hear the Word of the Lord and to receive His sacred feast.  I hate it.  I would rather the buildings be torn down than turned into community centers or art galleries or theaters or nightclubs or music venues or private homes.  If the churches are not going to preserve them, we owe it to ourselves and to the buildings no longer wanted or needed to prevent them from the sacrilege of misuse.  Okay, yes, I know.  We say a few words and deconsecrate them and so they are supposedly no different than any other structure.  Except that they still look like churches.

Growing up we often passed an old frame building that was once a thriving Lutheran congregation but it had been sold and moved and served as a hog house.  The shape of the windows told its story long after the markings of its sacred space had been removed or decayed.  Its steeple had been crudely cut off but everyone who saw it knew what had been there.  Not only the faithful knew, but even those who had never set foot in a church building before knew what this building had been and smelled what it was.  Shame on us!  A few shekels were more valuable to us than the sacred space in which couples had married, children baptized, youth confirmed, families grieved, faithful communed, and the songs of faith had rung out.  Shame on us!

If a church had been a warehouse in a previous life, most folks driving by still know what it had been.  The shape of churches is universal.  Signs can protest what the mind knows by instinct.  At least when such buildings are sold, they are returned to their first use and the temporary use as a house of God can rather easily be forgotten.  But churches that look like churches with the windows to the soul in their walls and a steeple pointing to heaven and chancels still carving out the holy of holies cannot be stripped of their identity simply by a few words.  What was designed into their bricks, stone, wood, and steel remains.  It is unmistakable.

Lets do us all a favor.  Lets not pretend what was never was and let us not presume that it makes no difference.  Instead, let us at least do the honorable thing and tear down what was set up for sacred usage so that no one is confused or scandalized and God is not mocked.  There are more and more church buildings coming on the market as Rome and others close down extraneous congregations and others die from within.  Protestantism has learned a terrible lesson about expediency and Rome has learned a terrible lesson about space and most of us just don't care anymore.  That is until you drive by one of those resurrected for less than holy purpose and then your skin just crawls.