It was a fantastic trip celebrating the high school graduation of my youngest daughter. One of the ways I’m going to best remember, the trip, however, is in terms of all the churches we saw.
As I’ve said before, I attend Christ Church in Gilbert Arizona (a suburb of Phoenix). We follow a trend that seems to be common in America of meeting in a very “non-traditional” building. That is we don’t have a steeple or a steep pitched roof.
We meet in a building that used to be a strip mall.
Yep! Our building is right next to a movie theater and a sandwich shop and a music shop. It looks nothing like the church buildings that I grew up attending.
On the inside it’s nothing like a steeple-style church either. We have sort of a minimalist/industrial vibe with concrete floors and exposed roof joists. I don’t think about it any longer. It’s just “my church”.
On the trip to England and Scotland, however, I came face to face with the architecture of centuries gone by. If my church’s modern building is one extreme of the spectrum, the churches we saw in the UK were on the complete opposite end of the spectrum.
One of my favorite churches was a little church in the village of Helmsley in Yorkshire. I thought the building was beautiful and it was surrounded on all sides by a graveyard with tombstones going back to the 17th century.
I thought that a church like this really represented a sense of place and connection. In my mind’s eye I imagined coming to a weekly worship, surrounded by the reminders of those who had gone before. Even though I might not have know them or their families, they would have been a solid symbol of where my path was leading and the hope in Christ that I held dear.
The stone construction wasn’t fancy, but was most certainly durable. I am trying to imagine worshiping in a place where people have been doing so for hundreds of years (as an American,that’s a really deep thought). Inside was a list of all the vicars dating back to the founding of the church in the 1300’s. That’s certainly durable!
The other side of the equation that I saw was the church of imposing physical magnificence. We saw a lot of those. Westminster, Yorkminster, St. Paul’s… Tremendous buildings that displayed grandeur on an awesome scale.
When I stood next to these churches I felt small, tiny, insignificant. I’m a big guy, and I don’t naturally or normally feel that way, so it was a very unique experience!
The ornamentation on these churches (inside and out) was also fantastic. It was like they had been designed to simply be beautiful. Never mind that each one was hundreds of years old and had been build before the advent of electricity and the gasoline engine.
As I write this, it’s Sunday morning and I’m getting ready to go to worship. God is above all. This is true in my strip mall church as well as in these grand cathedrals. The church building doesn’t matter – but God does!
Having said that, what kind of church building strikes your fancy? Send me an email and tell me how you like to worship. If you could pick one of the 3 types I’ve shared, which one would you pick? Or would you pick something that wasn’t represented on my list?
Until next month…
Dennis
PS. I know I’ve teased this before. But I’m going to commit now to sharing my fiction story with you next month. I’ve been working getting it all cleaned up and ready to go. Fiction is a lot different than non-fiction, and I’ve had a steep learning curve. But it’s a great story about an Angel who wants more and what happens when he gets it.
