Brian’s comment aroused a couple of thoughts in my mind and I’ll try and address it in the next two posts. The question it really brought up is: what do “unchurched people” or “non-Christians” really want in a church? From what I understood about what Brian said (and I think this is what a lot of people would say including myself at one point) is that non-Christians want a comfortable enviroment.
I think the reason we think non-Christians want “comfortable” is because that’s what we want. We want a comfortable place, so we build big churches, with fancy statues, waterfalls, game rooms, fireplaces and the list goes on. Sometimes we are honest and say it is for ourselves(“we simply need those extra rooms for Sunday school”), and other times we say it is for outreach (“we could have lots of concerts on this stage and people will get saved”). Now I’m not saying either of those things are true, or that they can’t be used for that, but I do question if that is really how we should be doing things. Or if Christianity is really about being comfortable in that way at all.
Category Archives: considering church
why a building?
I think my intitial hesitation about the whole building thing came when the church building craze started my last year of high school. My church decided we need to add a $2.5 million addition on to our building. I didn’t realize we were outgrowing the original building in the first place, and now they wanted to add on. And in adding on they wanted it to look really nice, which is understandable since the current building looked quite nice. But I thought to myself $2.5 million is a whole lot of money, and it just doesn’t seem necessary.
Little did I know over the next few years practically every church I went to was doing a building campaign. Some of them really needed it, others I wasn’t so sure. We attended one church for a while and then they started a building campaign for a second building and they where putting an indoor waterfall in it. That was it, I was gone.
Then at some point I started thinking… Why the heck do we need a building anyways? I mean we all live somewhere, why don’t we meet in our homes? It seemed to me that’s mostly what the early church did. I mean, it’s true we couldn’t all pack in to hear the really good preachers, but since when is that what it’s all about? Some would say that’s what small groups are for, to meet in smaller communities in our homes and stuff (I’ll address this later).
I’m not saying church buildings don’t have a purpose, I’ve just started questioning if they are really necessary at all. I mean is it feasible to do the things we do in a church building in our homes instead? And what about bigger events? Is it possible to do those in a place other than our own building?
One of my main concerns about the building is that seems to be all we spend our money on, or talk about spending our money on. The main time you hear about making tithing pledges in most churches it seems is usually related to a building campaign. And then the church goes into debt to purchase the new building before they even have all the money.
That was just a rant of sorts, I really should fine tune it a bit, but there it is raw