Person 1: What if we were to plant a church … in a building?
Person 2: What? That's ridiculous! Who'd ever go to a building for church? Besides it's such a waste of resources. The building would be used for a couple of hours a week?
This is a crazy thought, isn’t it? Why would the church building be the crazy idea?
A COVID kind of lesson
What about COVID-19? For far too many, the church building is not only crazy, it shows the world that we Christians care more about our clique than the health of the people in the clique, and the people we want to bring into the clique.
Building Why
This is not to say that the church building is bad. It\’s really to shine the light on how the church has used the resources God has gifted it for the benefit of itself.
Much of the “outreach” is come here so that you’ll come to a church service. Perhaps, the focus should be, “we’re part of the community, too, and we want to help you.”
Many would say, “that’s exactly what we’re doing,” except it’s often come to our church-y program that vaguely resembles a non-church activity.
I’m all for activities happening at church buildings. In fact, empty church buildings should offend you. This is not have a church-y activity every hour of every day, but let the building be used by the community, and, yes, we might need to bend on our expectations of their behavior.
Closing the Building
There is a question from a number of years ago, “if your church closed tomorrow, would anybody notice.” Perhaps we ought to be asking, “if you’re building closed tomorrow (think COVID), would it impact the community?” If the building’s existence is not positively impacting the community, is the existence of the building really fulfilling the mission of the church?
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