One of the common sins that the people of God in Scripture commit is the sin of forgetting God’s deliverances and mercies. And one of the great reasons for forgetting His mercies is the fact that we continue to enjoy them. When God delivered His people from Egypt, after they were out of Egypt they …
Not Whether You Build, But What
We have been considering the building of our new sanctuary, and want to make sure that we are evaluating all that we do in the light of God’s Word. One of the first things that men do when they are stirred up is that they build. The building can take various forms—music, and poetry, and …
Establishing His Name
As we continue our series of meditations on our new church building, we should reflect for a moment on the name it will have. Our church building will have the name of our church—Christ Church. The name of our church bears or carries the name of our Savior. We never want to take, or bear, …
Open Carry & Worship
We have noted that a church building is architectural speech. But in order to speak truly as a church, it needs to speak gospel. Made out of brick, and steel, and wood, and so forth, the architectural vocabulary is limited when it comes to doctrines like propitiation, substitutionary atonement, and so on. The task with …
Architectural Speech
A church building is architectural speech, and so if it is to be a Christian church building it needs to be the gospel in stone. Obviously, it cannot be as specific and defined as a sermon can be, and it does not have symbolic meanings assigned to it by Scripture, as the elements of the …
Speaking Defiance
The apostle Paul tells Timothy to “fight the good fight of faith.” He tells him in the next breath to “lay hold on eternal life.” In Ephesians, we are told that our battle is not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers. The language of Scripture concerning our pilgrimage here on earth is …
Orange Steeples
We do not usually have trouble being unselfish about things we don’t care about. If something is not connected to us, and is happening on the other side of the world, then the way of renunciation is easy. We let things go quite handily when they are things we never came in contact with. But …
Acoustical Centrality
In the beginning, John tells us, was the Word. And the Word was with God, and the Word was God. We are told other things about the Second Person of the Trinity elsewhere in Scripture—He is the icon of God, He is the wisdom of God, He is the Son of God, He is the …
Simplicity and the Sensate
Cultures pass through aesthetic phases as they rise and fall, and the last phase is the phase of decadence. It is the phase in which sensate spectacle is glorified, and it is a sign, not of glory but of decrepitude. Our generation is in the thick of this last phase. Our culture is attracted to …
Liturgy and Architecture as a Christian Woman
We have already seen that simplicity in worship (and in architecture) cannot be contrasted with beauty, as though it were an alternative to it. Simplicity is an aesthetic trait, and those who think that a building or a liturgy is automatically beautiful because it is complicated, with the maximum number of gold filigrees on it, …