PEOPLE, NOT PLACES

When the church is fundamentally a gathering of committed people, the place where the church gathers hardly matters.

Over the last few years, I have had many conversations, both inside and outside Brook Hills, about church buildings. Admittedly, I pastor a church that gathers in and enjoys the luxuries of one of these multimillion-dollar edifices. Because we have this building, I want us to steward it well, whether that means maximizing it for ministry or selling it and spending our resources differently. Everything is on the table, and the Lord will lead us in what is best. I realize that a lot of people in our church have sacrificed greatly to make our facility a reality, and I am deeply grateful for God’s grace in them. At the same time, I am not convinced that large buildings are the best or only way to use God’s resources.

You may ask (as members of our church and leaders of other churches have asked me in countless conversations), “What’s wrong with constructing church buildings? Nowhere does the New Testament say we shouldn’t construct church buildings.”

Why would we spend an inordinate amount of our resources on something that is never prescribed or even encouraged in the New Testament?

But that’s just it. There’s also nothing in the New Testament that says we should construct church buildings. So whenever we plant a church or whenever a church starts to grow, why is the first thing we think, We need to spend masses of our resources on a building? Why would we spend an inordinate amount of our resources on something that is never prescribed or even encouraged in the New Testament? Why would we not instead use those resources on that which is explicitly promoted in the New Testament, such as sharing the gospel with the lost or helping the poor in the church?⁴ As I write this, more than seven hundred million people around the world live in slums. Many of them are our brothers and sisters in Christ. Should we really be prioritizing bigger buildings for ourselves?

I spoke recently with the pastor of an inner-city church plant in the southern United States. His congregation numbers around one hundred people, and recently twenty of them went on a short-term mission trip to a third-world country. As they traveled, they read and discussed Radical and the truths from God’s Word that the book presents. By the time the team came back, God had transformed their hearts and minds in surprising ways.

They began reevaluating how they had been spending their lives and resources, both personally and corporately. When they looked at the church budget, they realized that their little church was spending five thousand dollars a month to lease building space downtown. So some of the members asked the pastor, “Why don’t we take this sixty thousand dollars a year and use it for something more eternally valuable?”

“Then where are we going to meet as a church?” he asked.

They pointed to the parking deck next to the space they were leasing. “We can meet over there,” they said.

“Outside?” he asked.

“It’s covered, it’s empty on Sundays, and we already know that it’s available for our use.”

The pastor gave it some thought and then said, “Let’s do it.” The church is now meeting outside every Sunday on a parking deck.

This is the beauty of New Testament Christianity, and I wonder if too many of us are missing it. We definitely do not have to construct buildings as houses of worship. In the words of Stephen before he was martyred by the Sanhedrin, “The Most High does not live in houses made by men.”⁵

Stephen was speaking to resistant people who were undergoing a major shift in the redemptive plan of God. They were used to seeing the presence of God symbolized in the temple, a monumental edifice. But with Jesus’ death on the cross, the way had been opened for people to dwell in the presence of God in any place.⁶ No central building was necessary. And as a result, they no longer needed to focus on a building as a house of worship.

Well, what would the house of worship be, then?

You guessed it: people.

Paul says to the church at Corinth, “Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit lives in you?” He later tells them that their bodies are the temple of God.⁷ This is the astounding reality of New Testament religion: we as Christians are the house of worship.

So let’s gather wherever we can—in homes, in offices, in workspaces, in parks, in any facilities we can find. Let’s remember that many of our brothers and sisters around the world simply meet outside. And let’s at least consider not spending such a large portion of our resources on building places when the priority of the New Testament is decidedly on building people.