He was talking about what they did with the facility.
As we sat and heard him talk, it highlighted just how much work needed to be done to help him and others have a different perspective.
There was an almost fatalistic view of the facility as solely for the purpose of ‘worship services’. As a result that meant that for the best part of half the week, a structure that had cost a significant amount for such a small group of people, and that cost a considerable amount to maintain, would lie dormant.
It would just be a structure standing in the middle of such a diverse community, but offering so little to them, and what was offered would not cater to the vast majority of them.
That just did not make any kind of sense to me.
Imagine buying, at great cost for purchase and maintenance, something designed for a particular use. Imagine after that not even utilising it to 30% of its usefulness and value. People would suggest that this is a waste of a resource. Yet this was exactly what was taking place with this facility and justified under the shroud of keeping the sanctuary ‘holy’.
Don’t get me wrong. When it comes to buildings for ‘worship’, I have grown somewhat wary of them. Wary in the sense that it can garner quite a large amount of fuss and resources. In a number of cases, these could be better invested in the people who gather as well as the surrounding community.
I have witnessed so much hassle placed on desiring to own property as if God desired to be worshipped in houses made of hands. As if His highest aim for humanity was archietectural. (It is, but the architecture is with people as the bricks.)
Even with that wariness, however, I don’t dispute the value that buildings have on people’s corporate worship experience. The concern for me is when such is the focus on the structure that it’s almost a fetish.
We spend more time and money on it, than on building a people who know what it is to worship in spirit and truth. We maintain the brick and mortar, but don’t nurture the heart and soul to see Christ beyond that.
We cage people to conceive of worship experiences as that which happens at a given time in THAT particular place. We do that and surprised when people don’t join us in the cage, and even more when people in the cage don’t appear to grow in their knowledge of Jesus.
Something to help that is a view of a facility – if one is genuinely needed – as a Jesus Centred Community Hub. The facility is used to benefit the immediate community whether believer or not. It reflects the values of a Kingdom People who know they are commissioned to show mercy, be compassionate, make peace, feed the hungry, cloth the naked, look after the orphan, widow and the stranger.
Such a perspective on the physical facility sees the sanctuary as a genuine place of refuge for all. It is a place where God can do His business in the lives of others through a variety of means from an English as a Second Language class, to dance therapy, to choir practice, to a nursery, to a luncheon club for the elderly, to a place of prayer. Ensuring the location is fully utilised as a proper resource in enabliing others to build their idea of worship as much around serving others as serving the Lord.
It is not about having a building-centred approach to faith and worship. It is ensuring that if you do have a building, or even if you rent it, it’s as much a service centre as one for your concept of worship.
It thus builds worshippers equipped to serve – beyond those four walls as well as in it.
For His Name’s Sake
Shalom
C. L. J. Dryden
Life With CD 