This morning I sat on the floor in a house I dearly love, emptied of all its things. The three of us—Helen, me, and the cat—sat on the floor after the removal guys had taken all of our earthly possessions and packed them onto a van.
We’re moving a few hours south, a long way on our little island at the edge of the windswept sea, for me to be a Pastor in a church here. This involves lots of change for us, as you might just imagine, and more beyond wondering if they’ll serve gravy with their chips down here. I’m not a Midlands lad, but 20 years in a place rubs off on you.
That’s it, a place rubs off on you. We’re moving for a new adventure in the Lord; we’re moving for good reasons and we’re happy about it. Yet, we sat on the floor, the three of us, and we wept. Or, two of us did, the cat seemed happy enough.
There’s a weight to leaving somewhere, especially somewhere that you’ve invested in. We’d made that house exactly what we wanted through the sweat of our own brow. I’ve told some of that story here before, but in precis we bought a wreck of a place, a slough of chaos. It got worse as we were swindled out of our savings. We rebuilt that ruin by the strength of our arms and the callouses of our hands, learning many skills in the process. We turned dust into beauty, carving spacious places from the wood-worm ridden, asbestos filled, pile of bricks we’d purchased.
We’d made it ours, and we’d done a fine job. Leaving it for a smaller place in a more expensive part of the country is galling, for all we’ve been blessed in many ways and the house we’re buying, that I’m sat in right now, is perfectly nice.
It would seem right to say, ‘it’s just bricks and mortar, why get emotional about it?’ That’s a reasonable question, but I want to suggest that place matters more than we like to think it does. The place doesn’t matter just because we had a nice house that we liked and that worked for us, but it matters for two reasons.
First, this was the work of our hands. We had made beauty from ashes. It’s not so much the amount of time or resources spent, it’s that we fought and won. Victory leads to love. Mastery leads to love. To make beauty is a worthy thing; to render it from proverbial ‘death’ is a holy thing.
Second, this was the place that we had loved and fed so many. This is where the table sat that we gathered around, this is where we prayed and wept and sang and rejoiced, this is where life happened. The life is more important than the place, but it’s not like it could have just happened anywhere. Places are not incidental. I learned that when I worked in pedagogy at a University; the shape and layout of a classroom changes the kind of learning its good for. Space isn’t incidental; it matters. These spaces were the ones that we loved and were loved in. The people matter more than the place, incomprehensibly more, but without the places those interactions wouldn’t have happened.
We were emotional about leaving those relationships, about that final moment even though all our goodbyes had been said because it’s at the moment of parting that the weight of it hits you. Those relationships are tied to that place and while they continue they will be inevitably different in another place. Perhaps better and richer, only the Lord knows what’s in store for us, but different nevertheless.
We sat, we wept, we got in the car and we drove out of the city into a new day. Inevitably it will have all its own challenges and joys, but we start a new chapter.
As I sit here in the new place being ‘useful’ while our stuff is unpacked from the van (writers gonna write), doing my key job of ‘stopping the cat from losing her mind,’ I’m thinking about place. Evangelicals don’t have a great theology of place.
I suspect that’s because we’ve internalised the truth that the church ‘is not the building but the people.’ This was hard fought for by those a generation or two above me but ingrained as an obvious truth in my generation. It was important to understand: the church is nomadic, sacred space is where the gathered church is, you can worship the Lord in Spirit and truth in a school sports hall. Buildings are a gift in so many ways, but they also take on a life of their own apart from the ‘church as church’ that can be both blessing and curse.
All that’s true, but I think it can also lead to this impoverished sense that ‘place doesn’t matter.’ The church could meet anywhere, right? Yes, it could. But if we have choices there are better and worse places. Place is not incidental. We built a dining room for the express purpose of gathering around our table to feast and open the word of God. The layout of the classroom is better or worse for the kind of learning that we want to do within it. The church building is not neutral when it comes to the worship of God.
Space is not neutral. I don’t mean that space either belongs to Jesus or the demons or something like that, that’s silly: Jesus’ reign is supreme and demons that infest places need to leave when his people tell them to. The whole world is his, and therefore ours. Rather, I mean that space affects the activities that we do in it.
This means that there are spaces that are more conducive to the worship of God. We can worship God anywhere, the earth is the Lord’s and everything in it (Psalm 24)! The whole cosmos is appropriate to worship God, that’s not my point, instead we find that certain spaces are more conducive to our worship of God. Places tell stories, change our emotions, and are fitting for certain activities. I’m not right now telling you what that space should be like but it’s worth considering when you get the opportunity. As has been much lambasted by our more traditionally minded brothers and sisters, ‘Conference Centre’ is probably not what you’re aiming for in terms of an aesthetic.
Just as our house did, spaces accrue meaning due to the experiences we have within them. It’s good and right to be a nomadic people, but people will attach the encounters they had with God to the places they had them in. The places aren’t ‘holy,’ but we naturally associate place with action. Actually, that’s wrong, they are holy, but only because anywhere that God’s holy people speak with him is holy. You are reading on holy ground right now, brother or sister, because you’re holy.
We need to be aware of these dynamics wherever our church meets, whenever we move where our church meets, and whenever we have the chance to get a building for our churches. We should probably think harder about how we design or decorate the spaces we have. Worship is our goal. I’m not convinced that ‘sacred space’ has to have one particular look, but I am convinced that the spaces we use can be more or less conducive to what we do in them, and that they accrue meaning and stories as people use them. These two notions weave together to make an outline of a theology of place; the actual details need filling in for that to be useful. Over to you.
Photo by Robinson Greig on Unsplash
To subscribe and receive email notifications for future posts, scroll all the way to the bottom of the page.
Would you like to support my work? The best thing you can do is share this post with your friends. Why not consider also joining my Patreon to keep my writing free for everyone. You can see other ways to support me here.
nuakh 