A Volley from the Canon, Number 74

A VOLLEY FROM THE CANON, NUMBER 74

THE EDIFICE COMPLEX

Pity the Church of England: Established. Historic. Stuck.
Stuck with a lot of things, but significantly, stuck with ancient buildings that, unfortunately, were built to last for the ages. Over the ages, populations have moved, economic realities have shifted, and just about everything has changed—yet there sits the old stone church, beautiful, majestic, unchanged, surrounded by death and decay in the form of its cemetery. The structures no longer meet the needs of the congregations, but they are saddled with their maintenance, sapping their resources and their energies for ministry. Does the church own the building, or does the building own the church?

In many instances, we are even worse off here in the Diocese of West Virginia. We aren’t established; therefore, we get no public funding, and have no status in the eyes of the public. Yet we have the same enslavement to our structures, the same Edifice Complex. In congregation after congregation, we have a building that was built in the 1800’s to serve a rural, nineteenth-century population (pretty much as a family chapel). Nothing has been added since: perhaps the congregation has taken over a house (often formerly a rectory) for dinners and Sunday School, but otherwise, the property remains unchanged. You know them well. Hard, wooden pews jam up against the side walls. Don’t even try to kneel if you are overweight! Heating is iffy, air conditioning—what’s that? There might be no running water, and almost certainly no rest room nearby. Clearly, something happened here 75-150 years ago. Just as visibly, nothing has happened since.

We love these old buildings. They are almost all beautiful, and they are hallowed by the prayers of the generations. At the same time, they are sucking all the resources from their congregations, and what they offer in return is woeful inadequacy for worship or study or gatherings of any kind. They offer little (or negative) attraction to un-churched persons in the community, unless they are history buffs. Some need to be turned over to actual historical societies, and the congregation needs to move elsewhere, accessible to real people now. I’ve heard, in a few places, discussion about whether it would be advisable to build, finally, a new parish hall alongside the old church. I say, Hold on! If we build anything, let’s build a multi-purpose center that supplants the old, dysfunctional church. Let the old building be what it has become—a historic structure, useful for the occasional wedding, small funeral, poetry reading, musical presentation, or historic or community worship service. Let the church, though rooted in history, be connected to now and leaning toward eternity.

We are tied down by many worldly chains. Our Edifice Complex is one of our strongest ones, and in many locales, it is strangling us.