What is the Church Building?

With a nod to Tertullian, I ask, “What indeed hath buildings to do with church?”

The answer is: Nothing. The church has nothing to do with buildings. Though buildings may be used by the church, they are not required to be the church. Buildings may help the church accomplish its mission, but at the same time, the church must admit that buildings may hinder the mission as well.

One thing the church must not do, however, is treat buildings like holy sacred places where the true, spiritual stuff happens and everywhere else is secular and unspiritual. Nothing could be further from the truth.

And yet, it is exactly this untruth which pervades the thinking of vast majority of people in our world today, both Christian and non-Christian alike.

And who can blame them?

On the side of almost every building where portions of the church meets is the word “Church.” The word is there whether people are gathered there or not. The word is on reader boards in the front lawn, and as people drive to work, they see billboard signs with pictures of a building and an invitation to “Come to Church.” If they do “come to church” one of the first things they hear upon entering the building is someone saying, “Welcome to Church.” The clear message is that you weren’t in church until you walked through those doors out front. It is no wonder that when people think of church, they think of buildings.

On top of all this, we treat church building unlike any other building. It gets special church decorations, special church music, special church art, and most of all, special church behavior. When you are in this building, you must wear certain clothes, say (or not say) certain things, and act in certain ways. If you go outside these often unwritten boundaries, someone pulls you aside (or calls you out from the pulpit) and tells you that such things are inappropriate for “God’s House.”

Are House Churches Different?

Even with some house churches, no matter what goes on in the house during the week, it seems that when “church is happening” the household rules change. The building becomes transformed into a place with new rules for behavior, a dress code, and only God-approved language. I’ve even seen house churches where “during the service” children are shushed, and afterwards, not allowed to run and play.

How did all of this happen? How did we get here? How did the place where believers meet for mutual edification become equated with “the church”? Over the next few days, we will look at a brief history of church buildings.