Architecture needs to be, like all other forms of human expression, honest. There must be no pretense, no sham, no attempts at misdirection. Centrally, when we are talking about the architecture of a church, the honesty must be of the kind that plainly recognizes that God is God, and we are not.
When you come into a church to pray, it must be the kind of place that helps you tell the truth, instead of the kind of place that aids and abets in the telling of lies.
There are many examples, but here is just one. It is easy for a traditional church with a very long nave to tell all the people that God is distant, down at the other end. This is not said in so many words, but it is said. And we acknowledge that God is transcendent, utterly beyond us, but in Christ through the gospel, He is the God who is with us, who has come down to us, who is present with us in our assembly. And this is why our seating is in a landscape layout, and not a portrait layout.
Picture the people of God gathering together around the Word and sacrament, the way we would gather around anything that was of great interest to us. This is an architectural expression of what we believe the church is. The church is an assembly of saints – not a long line of supplicants, where you have to stand in the back craning your neck.
And in this, we do not set the Word and sacrament into competition with each other. The service is not a zero-sum game, where the sacrament must give way to the Word or vice versa. Word and sacrament go together the way cooking and eating do. Services with great preaching and no sacrament are like celebrity chef television shows, where a lot of good food is prepared but not eaten. And sacramentalists are the ecclesiastical equivalent of a raw foods movements, where you come to church to get your puny carrot.
So let the stones cry out.