actually felt holy<\/em> when you walked into them? What if they felt like temples instead of programs?<\/p>\nI was talking with a student a couple of months ago. She grew up Methodist and is currently dabbling in Catholicism. I told her that I would probably go Catholic if I ever determined that I was called to leave ordained ministry behind. What we both love about the Catholic mass is its utter lack of programming. Sure there are meticulous rules about how it needs to happen to preserve its holiness, but there\u2019s no anxiety about making it accessible or attractive. We say the same damn thing every week. Children sit with their parents and cry as loud as they want. Whenever I drive across the causeway bridge to attend the Monday mass at St. Joseph\u2019s Abbey, I feel like I\u2019m \u201chome\u201d in a way that I never have felt listening to overwrought Jesus praise songs.<\/p>\n
Sometimes the priest has a beautiful voice when he chants, \u201cThrough him and with him and in him,\u201d but sometimes his voice cracks. The homilies are plain at best and usually quite\u00a0dull. But I\u2019m not really listening to the priest\u2019s words. I\u2019m closing my eyes and enjoying the real presence of Christ. The absence of anxious energy in the room has left space for me to palpably encounter this presence. Queer Catholic priest James Alison describes this in his Broken Hearts and New Creations<\/em>:<\/p>\nThere seems to me to be something quite wonderful about this, the quiet, serene, relaxedness, the lack of self-consciousness about Catholic worship, because we all know that Jesus is \u2018just there,\u2019 giving himself for us and inviting us in, and that he\u2019s bigger than the flakiness of so many of our liturgies and the idiocy of so many of our homilies, and he\u2019s obviously bigger and better than the flawed-ness of our priests, and, of course, of ourselves. [7]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The Catholics don\u2019t do stewardship campaigns. They don\u2019t start off their worship with the four most crucial announcements of service projects that desperately need volunteers. They don\u2019t have sermon series with special logos or weekly opening video clips. They don\u2019t have to make tough decisions about whether the children\u2019s choir or the gleaning project will get the primary real estate in the worship bulletin on a particular week.<\/p>\n
We Protestants have had every semblance of holiness about our worship space swallowed up by the practical. Nobody would ever think to kneel and cross themselves every time they pass in front of the altar. What if our sanctuaries were actually temples? What if it felt very natural for people to come into the room during the week and kneel with their eyes closed just to spend some time with Jesus? We may not grow exponentially, but we would be creating a distinctively\u00a0sacred space in a capitalist culture where all space has become utilitarian and transactional.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not sure exactly how to create a \u201ctemple feel\u201d in a church, but maybe that\u2019s part of the issue. Maybe it\u2019s not something we can do, but it\u2019s more a matter of what we don\u2019t do. Maybe it\u2019s a matter of emptying and surrendering rather than trying harder. Trying so hard all the time fosters anxiety. I really think the greatest factor in church decline is anxiety about church decline and all the ways that anxiety churns up a restless ambiance.<\/p>\n
I think a good starting place is to establish a daily rhythm of prayer in the physical space of our churches. Instead of spending every last second of our days worrying and planning, what if we decided that we would go into our worship spaces every day to pray in the morning, at noon, and in the afternoon before we leave? What if instead of doing \u201cLordweejuz\u2026\u201d type prayers, we actually followed a standard liturgy that we could stumble through when we\u2019re feeling really uncreative and exhausted.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t know if it will grow churches or not, but I\u00a0have a feeling I\u2019m not the only one who\u2019s looking for a temple that is a place for being instead of doing. Maybe it\u2019s worth considering how to design (or undesign) our church sanctuaries to actually be sanctuaries.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The latest buzz on the Christian internet is the Pew research report\u00a0about Christianity\u2019s decline in America. Mainline Christian denominations have imploded the most dramatically. I\u2019m sure that many of my fellow Methodist pastors and bureaucrats are wringing their hands about these numbers. What\u2019s the solution? More polished audiovisual resources for sermon series, more exotic VBS […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1934,"featured_media":13308,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[3267,524,537,3264,3263,1685,3265,3262,3266,2698],"class_list":["post-13302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture_","tag-american","tag-christianity","tag-church","tag-decline","tag-growth","tag-mainline","tag-pew","tag-program","tag-report","tag-temple"],"yoast_head":"\n
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