Don't argue with the building,
the building always wins.
—Louis WeilIn his essay, "Rending the Temple Veil: Holy Space for Holy Community" for Church Publishing's book
Searching for Sacred Space, Donald Schell writes,
Today most Christian buildings shape our communities to a theology Jesus rejected. Christians who remember and want to live Jesus' teaching and practice must ask if the Middle Ages or even the Reformation or the Vatican II reforms offer us spaces for worship that are adequate to an authentic community and lively sacraments. Like it or not, the church building and furniture literally will shape the community's ways of gathering and the ways people will see one another. Brick and mortar theology, our walls, our furniture, and our seating will define relationships, lines of communication, and all the invisible dynamic aspects of community. Whether our church buildings appear loving, daring, inviting, or forbidding, each one holds a church community and defines how it can act or move.
12 comments:
This implies, I'm afraid, that congregations without the means to pay for whatever changes are deemed necessary according to this theory will be theologically deficient.
You can always have a flood, fire, or tornado. Katrina wiped out the pews in Grace Episcopal Church, New Orleans, allowing the rector and other leaders to do what they had never been able to do: Get rid of the things.
Not to mention the arrogance of believing that only now, after two thousand years of (apparently) failing to be Christian, Mr. Schell and the other liturgical saviors of the twenty-first century are able to bring us to "authentic community" and "lively sacraments". Really?
I mean seriously — the sheer egotism required to believe that the Church of the Middle Ages or the Church of Vatican II or any other period failed utterly to be Christian! A bit more humility and space for valuing our history and the millions of saints who have gone before us is sorely needed.
i am sorry to see that the first two comments (bls and chris t. ) read Fr. Schell's thoughtful if provocative contribution so poorly. To chris t.: What nonsense is required to believe that the Church does not learn, grow, and indeed change through history.
To bls:this contribution does not imply the theological deficiency of any particular congregation, but rather that different buliding types and styles shape belief. As a priest who has served in several buildings i can only say that preaching or teaching against the theological precepts which underlie a particular building is indeed a difficult task.
David Hermanson
David --
I don't believe I said anywhere in my comment that the Church does not grow. But it stands on the shoulders of those who have gone before when it does so. Fr Schell's quote claims that present buildings are "shape[d] to a theology Jesus rejected" and implies that they are "[in]adequate to an authentic community"! That is not a call for reform -- that is an assertion that what has gone before us is worthless.
Incidentally, bls has done good work in the blogosphere pointing out that most communities that have gone in for these architectural innovations have become anemic very quickly. The ASA of the Philadelphia Cathedral is 70.
Numbers aren't everything, but the story behind the numbers is that innovators are coming in to functional communities that are striving to live out the Gospel and destroying them. As she points out, this program of wreckovation in the name of the Gospel is also one that only wealthy communities can undertake.
I agree that architecture can embody theological values. I love the great cathedrals of the world because they embody positive, Christian theologies -- they do not in any way embody ideas antithetical to Jesus' teaching, as Fr Schell asserts. I also love saying Mass in tiny communities gathered in living rooms -- which I do far more often than in large churches, since my communion's parishes are typically tiny and family-like. (Closer to the model of the early Church than St Gregory of Nyssa or the Philadelphia Cathedral, incidentally.) But unlike Fr Schell, I believe God can be worshiped in wonderous diversity -- we do not need some kind of monochromatic, enforced architecture to do that effectively.
bls and I read the quote carefully. We're familiar with this kind of reform -- it has failed in the Roman church for the last forty years. They are just stepping away from it -- and for some reason mainline Protestants are picking up this failed model and dusting it off. We need to leave behind the authoritarian "change for change's sake" model of the last forty years just as we needed to leave behind the similar "tradition for tradition's sake" model at Vatican II.
Let's acknowledge that people can worship God and preach the Gospel effectively in medieval cathedrals, in 1950s brick chapels, in living rooms, and outdoors, whether facing East or facing versus populum. The details are best left to individual communities, not to authoritarian priests writing liturgical fatwas from on high.
To David Hermanson:
The first sentence in this quote goes completely unsupported.
"Today most Christian buildings shape our communities to a theology Jesus rejected." Really? What theology did Jesus reject? Where, exactly, do you find this rejection? What do "buildings" have to do with it? How are they "shaping our communities"? What does any of this actually mean?
What "theological precepts" are you talking about? These are all very vague terms, and offered without support or proof of any kind.
What are you talking about? Evidence, please. Remember, I'm not the one who brought up bad theology here; the author quoted did. The clear implication is that our faithfulness as Christians depends at least in part on having the proper building to worship in.
But that's absurd. And as Fr. Chris notes, another conclusion that must be drawn is that no other communities until ours have been "authentically Christian." That's a heck of a lot of people to diss in one 21st Century opinion piece.
I'm going to ask straight out this time: what if a congregation doesn't have the money to make the "necessary" changes to its building? What if it can't afford to be "daring"? According to the quote, this will "define how it can act or move." Implication: if it's not the "proper" layout, it will be unable to act "properly."
Again: I'm not the one saying these things. I'm quoting directly.
I do believe that it is true on the face of it to say that buildings shape how the people who gather in them can gather. The connection to the architecture of buildings shaping communities with a theology Jesus rejected takes some connecting and Donald Schell does make a more extended case for the portion quoted in the full 31-page essay in which he points out the increasing physical and spatial barriers that develop in Christian worship spaces from the first Christian house churches to later developments.
I didn't take the argument to mean that one could have authentic Christian community and lively sacraments within certain architecture. I thought the point was more of, since buildings shapoe our theology, we should consider what architecture would best support authentic community and lively sacraments.
With bls and chris t., I too feel that is not one set answer, but that God is and has been present in powerful ways in many physical settings. I was humbled in St. Peter's Basilica when I visited it last year and have enjoyed worshipping in a variety of spaces.
Yet, as a church planter, I did face (with my congregation) questions about how our theology should inform our architectural choices. In doing so, the book in which this essay is found was helpful for the variety of thoughtful perspectives it brought to that process of planning our liturgucal space.
Thank you for your own thoughts on this, King of Peace. I would say, though, that Fr Schell's assertion that the Church of the Middle Ages or the Church of the Reformation failed at creating spaces that meaningfully embody the theology of the Gospel is beyond the pale.
Fr Schell seems to believe, as the Roman wreckovators after the Second Vatican Council did, that we have to get back to the early Church in order to worship authentically. Yet in the first place this stance does exactly what David wrongfully accused me of -- it acts as if change is a bad thing and growth impossible. Why should the 21st century Church try to worship like second-century house churches instead of drawing on the whole Christian architectural tradition? Furthermore, the ideas these reformers have about the early Church are largely made up — we don't actually have much information at all about early Christian worship, and what we do have supports trends in Christian worship that the reformers don't like (such as ad orientem prayer — see Uwe Lang's book on the subject).
I know precisely what is going on here, because it went on in the Roman Catholic tradition thirty years ago. It was a bad idea there, and it's a bad idea elsewhere — and it's being pushed with precisely the same authoritarian bent as it was in the Roman churches, only now it's in the Episcopal Church, the ELCA, and so forth. What Fr Schell is pushing — with some very intemperate language and very little room for dissent — is only meaningful for a tiny segment of the Christian world. (A segment, I might add, dominated by baby boomers who are increasingly the history, rather than the future, of the Church. Young people like me do not like it.) It should not be used a model for entire denominations or the Church Catholic at large.
I've gotten rather intemperate myself in these comments, because this is a topic that exasperates me as a young person who has to listen to fiftysomething and sixtysomething leaders tell each other about how people like me want mediocre worship and architecture because it "feeds young people" and is more like the early Church.
So let me state my argument positively, rather than negatively.
Ecclesiastical architecture absolutely does embody theological values. I agree with Fr Schell on that point.
But, to take just one example, the magic, soaring vertical space of a Gothic cathedral makes a theological statement that house churches cannot — and I believe that is a statement entirely in keeping with the Gospel. Those soaring vertical spaces state that while worship is, in part, about the horizontal experience of community, it is primarily about the vertical experience of becoming a part of the Body of Christ, part of the community grounded in the Godhead of the Trinity. House churches of the second century could not make that statement even if they wanted to, because they could not openly build structures and wouldn't have had the resources (or, indeed, the engineering) if they'd wanted to. It's a mistake to assume that because they didn't worship in these spaces, worshiping in them now is contrary to the Gospel.
The high altar of these churches is indeed separated from the people vertically (by the traditional three steps). Some may read this as privileging the clergy, but this is a disordered reading of the space, one that reads it hostilely, against its intent. The intended meaning of this choice is, first, that the Eucharist we celebrate is a sacrament, a real, efficacious thing and not merely a symbol. It is a gift from God, so we "ascend" to say the prayers and celebrate the sacrament. This connects with a theology of Holy Orders that says the priest is not acting as an exalted human when saying Mass, but stands in the role of Christ. So any priest who wanted to read the space as conferring special respect or honor upon himself or herself would be misreading the space.
There is also the issue of ad orientem celebration. Spaces that permit this make a positive statement about precisely the communal aspects of worship that Fr Schell wants to highlight. Ad orientem celebration de-centers the priest-celebrant. It makes the Mass about God, to whom we all turn at once to pray, rather than about Father Friendly standing up front, making "meaningful eye contact" with us and cracking jokes. It emphasizes that we are all a part of this act as the unified Body of Christ, not separated into "audience" and "performer" as versus populum celebration can sometimes do.
These are three specific theological statements that the traditional spaces being discussed here make. I don't think one can take exception to the statements I'm reading from the spaces — they are part of sound Christian liturgical theology. What one can do is willfully misread the spaces to claim that they say something besides what they intend to say — to claim that the priest "turns his/her back on the people" in the ad orientem posture, or to claim that elevated altars privilege the celebrant over the people, or that vast vertical space is about showing how powerful and rich the parish is. But if one reads the spaces with the intent of the architects and the Church, and with the readings of the people who gather there, instead of hostilely, according to a pre-conceived liturgical program, one will not be able to draw the conclusions Fr Schell has drawn. These spaces make valuable theological statements, and we toss away those statements and those architectural traditions at our peril.
Doesn't anybody realize how many of the great Christian mystics came out of the Middle Ages? St. Francis, St. John of the Cross, St. Julian of Norwich, St. Teresa of Avila - all were medieval. Were their communities not "authentically Christian"? Did they lack for "lively sacraments"? I hardly think so.
I do not understand why some people seem utterly fixated on buildings and other externals - and not at all interested in the life of faith and in the teaching and practice of prayer.
The Daily Office is not said in most local parishes any longer; couldn't we first worry about that instead of about "daring" buildings that cost a fortune to construct?
It just isn't true, in any case, that "authentic community" is impossible in a traditional church building.
I didn't know this conversation was happening as it unfolded and would have gladly taken part. I would have enjoyed finding points of agreement with some who believed they disagreed with me completely.
I certainly don't have anything against high and awesome spaces (though I do usually prefer Romanesque to Gothic). And our practice at St. Gregory's was that the presider faced liturgical East- with the people gathered round, crowded in close enough that most couldn't 'see.' It was shaped to be a shared experience rather than the more typical post-Vatican II priest-centered demonstration-showing.
I was in Malawi at the time, happily worshipping with sister and brother Anglicans. Tomorrow I'm returning to Africa for another taste of the strong touch of the Spirit in worshipping communities - Timkat (Epiphany) in Ethiopia.
I do think barriers were introduced by common consent of clergy and laity to keep the people distant from the sacred. I do think our Anglican reformers got that when they began a practice of gathering the people around a table in the choir for communion. And my strongest opinion about space is that relatively recent developments (Christopher Wren remaking churches as preaching auditoriums)have deprived most of us of the primary icon of Christ in our liturgy - his light in the faces of our sisters and brothers. Medieval and collegiate choir seating didn't do that. Huge Byzantine, Gothic, or earlier liturgies (with no fixed seating) didn't do that.
What's it got to do with the teaching of Jesus? What does he teach us is holy? People and merciful forgiveness.
Dear Ones,
At the risk (hope?) of restarting this discussion, I offer Michael Aune´s maxim: "meanings are always meanings-to-someone."
Applied to architecture, this means that a building is not "meaningful" in and of itself, but in relation to the people who use or experience it.
But I am pretty sure that MY experience of Westminster Cathedral would be different from that of the people who first worshipped in it.
I can find Westminster very meaningful personally but that does not mean that the Latino blue collar congregation that I once led would find it meaningful if at all. For one thing, practically all the statues are devoid of color!
Like buildings and all art, theological meanings have something to do with whom they are meaningful to. This insight is at the core of Biblical interpretation. We have learned to ask, What did the passage mean to the writer? to its first hearers? through history? to us today?
I would suggest that we need to do the same with liturgical elements such as place, text, music, action, objects, etc., for if the liturgy is going to mean something to its participants it must, in some sense at least, be theirs. Otherwise we will be speaking Hebrew to Greeks. Instead, To the Greeks, we must be Greek, like St. Paul.
A final note. As a kid, I played at saying Mass. Eventually I memorized the whole Tridentine rite, in Latin. Later on, I learned Latin, but never presided in the rite. Unless I am sent by God to a congregation that speaks Latin, I probably will never preside in it, even though I like it , understand it, and can pray in it. It´s Cranmer´s fault, you see. He died for that.
Above all, always and everywhere, clergy profit by the humble recognition that what is meaningful "to me" may not be so to Christ´s people staring one in the face.
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