Another aspect of funding a church building is the important element of faith. We often feel like we are supposed to trust God for “spiritual” things, like our salvation, but that when it comes to finances we have to learn how to be “realistic.” Unfortunately, being realistic often means adopting worldly techniques that could just as easily be used in building a civic auditorium.
But God’s people need to do everything differently. And even when we do something externally similar to what unbelievers might do, the insides of the thing have to be totally differently. Jesus says this about how God cares for us.
“Consider the lilies how they grow: they toil not, they spin not; and yet I say unto you, that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. If then God so clothe the grass, which is to day in the field, and to morrow is cast into the oven; how much more will he clothe you, O ye of little faith?” (Luke 12:27–28).
The admonition at the tail end of this says it all. “O ye of little faith” means that we need to learn how to trust the Lord who loves to adorn things. This is a “how much more’ argument, and Jesus says that we are to look at the flowers of the field and reason from that to what God has prepared for your wardrobe. And we are therefore invited to reason from both the flowers of the field and your wardrobe to the way our sanctuary will look and feel when we are done.
Men without faith build things too, and the results of their work are either sterile or excessively gaudy. This is another way of saying that a true and living faith has a lively aesthetic sense.
This means that we must take care to make sure that faith is our motivation in every aspect of this, from the fund-raising to the placement of the cross on the steeple.
So let the stones cry out.