The Language of Buildings

Thinking Well About Places, Buildings, and People

This post is about the building we call church, and why, in my view, buildings and land are not merely incidental, but rather deeply important to the life of a church. If this is true, it follows that we need to think carefully about the building in which we worship and what it speaks, or can speak. Perhaps communication doesn’t simply take place in the building, but also by the building.

I’m sure that many of us have heard some version of the idea that it’s really only people that are the Church. While I understand part of what that statement is getting at, in recent years I’ve found myself uneasy with it. I certainly believe that the church is more than a building, but I’m not convinced that it is less. Buildings, and the ground upon which they sit, matter and project meaning.

My journey towards a greater appreciate for the meaning of buildings came about through three encounters. First, many years ago, one of my former professors took me to see his parish after our lunch together. He told me how the church where he served as rector had been built by the people in his congregation and how, as you might imagine, that history was important to their parish life and memory. (This reminds me of our own history and our current building at All Souls. While we didn’t build from scratch, we had people think deeply and well about the transformation of our building. They tied the past to the present, thought about form and function and focused our attention on the cross and Table. Much of this post is about continuing to uphold this type of care and thought as we move forward! ) He then told me to look up. “You’ll have to use your imagination a bit, Phil, because we’re not a cathedral or anything, but do you see how the ceiling in the nave is designed to look like the base of a ship?” His church, similar to the one pictured below, is kind of like an upside-down ship. The point, he told me, was that the church was to find people who were drowning and bring them into the boat. The church was to be a place of safety and saving for those tossed about by the often brutal waves of the world. The building itself was to teach or remind people of this. After that conversation I started paying closer attention to buildings. I started to ask questions not only about function (how it works), but also about form (what it means).

The second things that got me thinking more deeply about buildings was a friendship I formed with Aaron. Aaron studied architecture at Harvard and then returned to the city he grew up in to work as an architect. He’s a fascinating guy because he uses his knowledge not only to design larger projects, but also to structurally help the inner city. I’ll never forget when he and his wife visited Marisa and I in Toronto many years ago. He took us throughout the city and showed us just how intricate and meaningful the details of the various spaces were downtown. He showed us, for example, how the center of the tile in one building was spaced perfectly to tie it into the building across the street. He then took us to some postmodern buildings and explained what they meant, or better, what they didn’t mean. He seemed to know the city better than me even though I lived there. Buildings, I continued to learn, reveal things to us if we are paying attention.

The third experience happened in Atlanta. Sometimes when you live in a place it becomes easy to neglect to go to the spot you would if you were a visitor. It’s easy, in other words, to take your place for granted. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is one of my heroes. Strangely enough, though, while I had lived south of Atlanta for years I had never visited King’s church, Ebenezer Baptist Church. My parents came to visit once and wanted to see it and so I took them. Something happened to me in that place. The floor reminded me of the church I grew up in which jogged my memory and subsequently unlocked something in me inside that building. I began to picture the children running around there and I thought about what worship must have been like during the difficult days of the civil rights movement. I thought of how in the very building I was standing, people gathered and found strength as they worshipped together. I suddenly found myself weeping. I wept not because I met someone who explained the history to me, rather, I wept because I knew the building held memories and those memories were somehow speaking to me through time in place.

Henri Nouwen once wrote,

"I find it easier to pray in places where people have prayed long before, and harder to pray in places where seldom a prayer has been uttered. This is important to me, since I move around quite a bit. In an empty train compartment, a hotel room, or even a quiet study, there often seems to be a spirit that holds me back."¹

Thomas Merton, in his famous book The Seven Story Mountain, writes of his journey towards faith. At one point he writes of a trip he took to Rome. He was planning on seeing the ancient ruins, but recalls that,

“After about a week–I don’t know how it began–I found myself looking into churches rather than into ruined temples….I was unconsciously and unintentionally visiting all the great shrines of Rome, and seeking out their sanctuaries with some of the eagerness and avidity and desire of a true pilgrim, though not quite for the right reasons. And yet it was not for a wrong reason either.”²

And then he writes about how he saw the relics in these churches:

“These things did not speak to me, or at least I did not know they spoke to me. But the churches that enshrined them did, and so did the art on their walls.”³

Churches speak. This past summer our family went to Halifax, Nova Scotia, the city where I grew up. When we were downtown, we walked into a cathedral that was undergoing construction (pictured below). When we walked in my son immediately said, “you can feel the holiness.”

All of this to say: buildings matter. But if it is true that buildings matter, and I believe it is, there are some things that we need to pay close attention to. First, while function is important (yes, we need sound panels!), so is form. When we make decisions about the building, even seemingly small ones, we need to keep the question, “what does this say about God,” top of mind. We must also remember that a building exists in a particular place. If the building becomes a fortress from that place instead of a hospitable part of it, the building is still communicating, but not what it should be – at least if that building is a church. It can, like anything, become an idol. It is also worth pondering hard questions like, What does a pristine cathedral speaks in impoverished neighborhoods, or What do bars on the windows speaks in a dangerous neighborhood? As Gordon Smith reminds us, “Built space is not a matter of theological or architectural neutrality.”⁴ It’s important, then, to remember that God hasn’t merely gifted us a building – as astonishing a miracle as this is! – God has also gifted us a place. We are planted in this particular soil, in this part of the city, with this particular building, at this time. Because of this, we need to prayerfully ask ourselves again and again, what does it mean to be a church here. What is our building, and how we use our building, communicating to our neighbors about God?

I have a close friend who works for the Canadian military. He’s an atheist, but loves his padre (military chaplain). He also loves what I do, and so we often talk about matters related to chaplaincy and church. One time he told me that he really loves to go to the chapel on the military base and just sit there in silence. For him, it’s a place of peace. He told me that if our churches were more like that chapel, he’d go and sit in them. I think this captures something of the “urban monastery” concept that All Souls has talked about through the years. The truth is, this is hard, because there are a lot of practicalities to consider. But I wonder what kind of baby steps we could take to become a place of peace in our city, beyond (but including) Sundays. How could our building say good and true things about God to our neighbors? This is a question we need to continually wrestle with.

So, back to the idea that it’s only people that are a church. Perhaps the truth is more complex than that. I think Eugene Peterson has some wise words for us here:

Church on one level is something we can see. It is a building. It is a place on earth. It is local. We can walk into it through its doors, gather with others within its walls, talk and study and pray under its roof. It is not uncommon to hear people dismiss a church building as "nothing but bricks and mortar." In a world that gets its meaning from "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us," that is a very unspiritual thing to say. That is like saying "She's nothing but a pretty face," or "He's nothing but a doormat," or "Jesus is nothing but blood and bone." Nothing is "nothing but." Church is also something we can't see. We can't see the ascension of Jesus. We can't see the "descent of the dove." We can't see sins washed away. We can't see the birth of a soul. We can't see the river of life. It is not uncommon for people to walk into a church out of curiosity, look around, leave, and later report to their friends, "I couldn't see that there is anything to it." That is also a very unspiritual thing to say, for a great deal of what we live by is unseen, the air we breathe and the promises we make, for a start.⁵

Maybe that’s a good reminder. The church is both what is unseen and what is seen. These two things are’t working against each other. We pray and we mow the lawn. We discern and we hang banners. We sing and we plant flowers. So, yes, the church is of course more than the building. But the building still speaks and it is an important task for us to continually ask what it is speaking, and to imagine what it could speak.

1. Henri J. Nouwen with Michael J. Christensen and Rebecca J. Laird, Discernment: Reading the Signs of Daily Life (New York: HarperOne, 2013), 32.

2. Thomas Merton, The Seven Story Mountain (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1948), 119-120.

3. Ibid. 120.

4. Gordon T. Smith, Institutional Intelligence: How to Build an Effective Organization (Westmont, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2017), 151. 

5. Eugene H. Peterson, The Pastor: A Memoir (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), 127-128.