Many of us refer to ourselves as “New Testament Christians”—i.e., our faith is centered on Jesus and our belief He’s the Messiah … God’s only Son who revealed to us the nature, heart, and character of the Heavenly Father. We believe salvation is a gift of grace imparted to us as a result of our expression of faith in what He did for us through His death on the Cross. While we respect and revere the Old Testament as the soil from which our faith sprouted, we no longer feel bound to its overwhelming rules and regulations.
Yet many of us who consider ourselves “New Testament Christians” embrace some theological tenets and precepts that are very Old Testament in nature. There are undoubtedly a number of these I could highlight. However, there were two I’ve encountered more times than I care to recall during the course of my three-plus decades of pastoral ministry. In this post, and the next one, I want to speak to them.
The first has to do with the idea of the church building being a sacred space. I know, as a child, my parents instilled in me the fact I shouldn’t run in church, particularly the Sanctuary (although when my mother went to the church on Saturday to practice the organ, it wasn’t uncommon for my brother and me to have races under the pews to see who could get from the front of the sanctuary to the back row the fastest—and she was fine with that, as it kept us from disturbing her). Also, on the Lord’s Day we’d always put on our “Sunday best” before heading out the door. The message conveyed was that the church building was kind of like the library—a place where we should whisper and behave in a restrained and calm fashion.
I remember, in the late 60s or early 70s, the teens at our church did a musical called “Life” that featured guitars, drums, and electronic keyboards. The female teens were dressed in floral maxi skirts and the guys wore bell bottoms and brightly colored disco-type shirts with puffy sleeves. The music was reflective of the movement happening in the broader society at that time and the church leadership, although they wanted to affirm and support the teens for all their hard work, deemed that the presence of those kinds of instruments in the sanctuary was too controversial to where their performance was scheduled for the church’s Fellowship Hall. Something that was that worldly shouldn’t be allowed in a sacred space. When I shared with my boys this memory from growing up in the church, they were stunned. They couldn’t believe this was ever an issue, or that people could make such a decision with the perceived endorsement of God.
But there are echoes of that “sacred space” understanding that live on. At one of the churches I pastored, we spent untold hours in board meetings—and there was a particular guy that championed this cause—trying to get congregants to demonstrate “respect for the building.” Granted—our church building was new, and we needed to put some things in place to preserve and care for our investment. But that wasn’t really his motivation. His motivation was that this was God’s house and people were supposed to comport themselves in a certain way. My sense was that if we were doing our job as a church, there’d be people in the facility who were not familiar with the church behavioral code and didn’t know how to conduct themselves, and we should be OK with that—that while we should try to put some reasonable safeguards and policies in place, we shouldn’t turn it into a police state where we were constantly keeping our eyes peeled for behavioral infractions. We should love them enough to overlook and move past some of these perceived shortcomings that caused the building to not look as pristine and immaculate as he wanted. I remember one night, when this topic came up for the umpteenth time, my frustration boiled to the point where I blurted out, “I long for the day when this board will spend as much time talking about how to get lost people to Jesus as we do trying to get folks to demonstrate respect for the building!” If looks could have killed, I would have had to leave that meeting in a body bag.
At another church I pastored, we were facing a space crunch and determined the most cost effective and reasonable approach to our dilemma was to transition our sanctuary with pews to a multipurpose Ministry Center with chairs. We had a number of folks—mostly older—who really struggled with the idea. The notion the teens could be doing their zany, wacky things (like on the Wednesday before Christmas using rubber bands to fling small candy canes at empty aluminum can pyramids … or having nerf wars) in the same space where we worshipped was incompatible and contradictory in their minds.
What helped turn the tide was when I shared that this notion of sacred space was an Old Testament theological construct—an opinion that emerged out of the deference and regard the Jewish people had for the tabernacle and, later, Temple. If you read the Old Testament, you realize there were a number of restrictions on who could enter the Temple. There were behavioral guidelines, as it was believed to be the dwelling place of God. But, with the advent of Jesus and the gift of the Holy Spirit, that arrangement was rendered null and void. In Rev. 21:3 we read, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them” (NIV). No longer does He live in a certain space. He now dwells in the hearts of his folks.
While this is an image of a future reality that is not fully and completely realized, it is also a reality into which we are to begin to live here and now. Paul speaks to this in Ephesians 2 when he says, “Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord” (v. 19-21, NIV). His point is that, because of the indwelling Holy Spirit, each of us is God’s dwelling place. When we come together with others in whom the Spirit dwells, we become a holy temple. In other words, God is no longer into inhabiting buildings—His focus is on inhabiting people! And when His people occupy a space, it becomes sacred … not because of its furnishings or accoutrements, but simply because of their presence.
God is not in the building unless we, His people, are in the building. But here’s the good news: When we, His people, are not in the building but out in the surrounding world, God is there, too! For He’s not a stationary and fixed God—He’s portable and goes with us wherever we go.