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 sacraments do—water, bread, and wine. But everything in this world speaks, and so we have to take care to speak the truth.
The first step in speaking the truth is to avoid lies, above all, lies that we might want to speak to ourselves. The apostle John says that if we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. This means that a church building needs to declare the glory of God, without veering into the pride of man. The building must not be a monument to ourselves. It must not say, or imply, that we “have no sin.”
One of the reasons for building a historic church building is that this enables us to carry all the connotations of Christian proclamation over the last two thousand years. God is great and good, man was created in innocency, we fell from that estate, and God has sent a great Redeemer to save us from our sins by His death and resurrection.
But what we say about the building must not be contradicted by the building.
It is not a problem that words are necessary to accompany the building, as I am using words now. The sacraments that Christ Himself established work in this way—they require the Word to accompany them. Without the Word there is no sacrament. But the Word fills out the sacrament; it shouldn’t fight the sacrament. The Word tells us that water means cleansing, which would be impossible, for example, if the sacrament contradicted the Word by using mud. In the same way, when we preach the gospel in the new sanctuary, and when we observe the sacraments there, the building must resonate with what we do.
So let the stones cry out.
As are the sacraments, design is all about relationship: diminishing, magnifying, and defining how this should relate to that. I have been spending some time now thinking on the implications, and driving assumptions, of the spatial arts, and perhaps what kind of design language a distinctly Reformed architecture would entail. It certainly wouldn’t be in the likeness of Louis Sullivan or Le Corbusier. Hmm, thanks for this post.