What the eye beholds. . .

For many liturgical Christians, and in particular Roman Catholics, the experience of going to church on Sunday morning is made more difficult with buildings which are unfriendly to the liturgy.  We all know this and even though some of those were built in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, the people are forced to inhabit structures which do not fit the purpose of worship.  I am purposely ignoring evangelicals and wannabe evangelicals who do not even have a concept of liturgy or church architecture and who delight in providing a warehouse setting for worship in which the stage, the band, and the talking head are all that matters.  What is at odds with the liturgy is an architectural focus on people more than God.  While you might assume that this has only to do with a lack of vertical dimension, it is also true of the kind of art or the lack of it in those structures.  They have the feel of larger personal space more than the formal space of the Word and the Sacraments.  They seem like public spaces in conference centers or other public gatherings in which the whole thing is designed around the desire to schmooze rather than to hear the voice of God's Word or receive His gifts.  They are pedestrian, devoid of art, ornament, symbolsm, and any sense of the holy.  Many of them are downright ugly on top of it -- with brutalist forms and materials that are cold and aloof.  It is no wonder that the liturgy suffers when the regular environment in which it lives is so at odds with its purpose.

While some might insist that the liturgy can function anyway, and that is true, we are not talking about the exception but about the regular place where the people of God gather.  Of course, the liturgy can take place in the barest or ugliest of places but why should it have to?  Why should it be forced to take on the role of making the obviously secular setting a home for the holy ground on which God meets His people with His grace and gifts?  But what it exactly what we have done.  We have forced the liturgy to fight against the surroundings in order to do its job.  While this is obviously about the adornment or lack thereof, it is also about the space itself.  So often modern buildings are reluctant to surrender any space to the chancel and so that whole focus of the liturgy in those spaces is compacted within a setting that refuses to make the movement inherent in the liturgy possible or to accommodate the Divine Service.  I grew up in one such church building that had a chancel smaller than most master bathrooms.  It did not allow for kneeling or for more than a few to commune at a time and the furniture in it had to be moved simply to allow the distribution to take place.  The furnishings were fine but they were crammed into a space smaller than the church kitchen.

Some of you might think that this is merely about preference or taste or even nostalgia for another time.  This may have a very small part in this, I do not deny, but the major problem here is not the longing for another era or the desire to build a gothic cathedral.  It is simply this.  Will/does the space hinder the liturgy and support what happens there or does it work against it?   For those who complain that this is merely about aesthetics, how do you explain a God who goes to such great pains to tell the Israelites what the Temple should look like -- right down to the vestments of the priests -- but thinks that less is more for the New Testament?  Did God get a lobotomy?  Or maybe we have misread a great many things.  At stake is not mere style or taste but theology.  The space itself has a relationship to what takes place within that space.  A ballroom may be a great ballroom and a terrible space for worship.  The same is true of a bar or tire shop or grocery store.  They are built to accommodate their purpose.  Why do we think that churches should not be built or remodeled to support what happens therein?  Why should church buildings not accommodate their purpose and support what takes place within them?  It is clear that people outside the faith expect Christians churches to look like, well, Christian churches.  Is there a reason those inside the Church think otherwise? 

I am not saying that every bad building must be torn down but we ought to evaluate the space and decide how to make it accommodate its purpose.  Some may be remodeled rather easily and inexpensively in order to do just that.  Others will need bigger budgets and dreams.  A few may not be salvageable.  In any case, what the eye beholds reflects what the mind conceives.  That is what is at stake in the subject of church architecture.