For better or worse the fastest way to force change upon a church is to burn the building down. For worse because of obvious reasons: the trauma associated with losing a church building can kill a congregation. For better because it forces a congregation to stop living in their parents’ house and gets them considering what they really believe about their life together with God.
Buildings always set our beliefs about ourselves and God into concrete, steel and wood. Sanctuaries reflect our beliefs about worship. Getting rid of the altar, in favour of a pulpit, front and centre, is a radical rethinking of the proclamation of the Word, moving the focus away from priestly mediation.
In the same way, in the post – war boom many churches added Christian education wings. Why weren’t these churches originally designed with Christian education in mind? Surely there were children around before the 1950s? There was a profound shift in the way we understood education at the turn of the 20th century and this led to a shift in the way we understood practising our faith. Until universal education was a societal ideal it wasn’t part of our understanding of what it meant to be a Christian. Who would design a building now without classrooms and offices?
The building reflects what we believe. By maintaining the building we maintain the beliefs it embodies. Change becomes difficult and undesirable because buildings are expensive to modify and they confirm us in our own self understandings.
Capital campaigns are not about buildings, they are about “mission.” Recent stewardship thinking now focuses on mission activities instead of objects like buildings. “Money follows mission” is a mantra that guides us away from giving to buildings to funding “mission.”
This is true but unless we push further, to ask, “What is mission?” the shift does little to explain or justify how we actually spend millions of dollars a year because it does little to understand the theological value of buildings. The Church does not have a mission; the Church is a mission. The mission of the Church is to witness to God who reconciles us in Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. We gather together in our sanctuaries and we worship God. We equip the saints, young and old, in our classrooms. We send the Church into a world where God is already doing God’s work. We gather, equip and send as a witnessing community. Each of these tasks requires some space. We need a space to worship, a place to learn, and a launching pad to go forth into God’s world.
Capital campaigns, more often than not, fund the space where God’s people can be the Church as mission. They are about giving congregations the space to rethink their ideas of worship by reshaping the physical space. Against the inertia of our old buildings, capital campaigns can help us to reimagine our life together. The challenge in the coming years is to figure out what kind of space is best for us to send witnesses into the world.
About Blair Bertrand
Rev. Dr. Blair Bertrand is minister at Calvin, Abbotsford, B.C.
