All of this is submitted to God, but, Lord willing, our church sanctuary is going to have a steeple. And a steeple illustrates the perennial problem that believers have in this fallen world. A steeple can be illustrative of the humility of man before God, but it can also be a glaring example of the pride of man. We want the former, but the latter is never far away.
One the one hand, we know how small we are before God. A steeple expresses the finite yearning of creatures for the transcendent, and it points to the only place our salvation can come from—from Heaven above. This is a God-given humility. On the other hand, in the course of building it, we might come to notice that it is taller than those other steeples, and that the design is more fitting. This kind of thing can even reach pathological levels, where we take pride in how much more humbly we yearn for the transcendent than they do.
Pride is an insidious sin, and it is capable of working with any materials. Human pride can glory in having no steeple at all, and we could all worship in a tiny little box calling one another by the names of brother and sister, greeting each other with the phrases like grace and peace, and a holy kiss, sprinkling our conversation with words like yea and verily, with the women vying with each other over who had the plainest bonnet, and only be doing any of it because we thought we were better.
Can a beautiful woman take pride in her makeup? Well, certainly, but pride doesn’t go down the sink as easily as the makeup does. The only thing that deals with the pride of life is the gospel of Jesus Christ, with application of that gospel being made by the Holy Spirit of the Father, who straightens things out where it all begins, which is in the human heart.
So what do we want our steeple to mean? Among other things, we want it to be a summons to the prideful. We want it tall so that the purblind can see it. This is the place where we all come to die. So let the stones cry out.
And bells to call all sinners to come.
Well, on one level, yes. But on another level, God meets with us when we gather to meet with Him in the assembly. We can’t really do that all inside our own hearts, so there’s nothing wrong with having the building we do it in, serve to picture what we’re doing there.
Has anyone else enjoyed William Golding’s 1964 novel “The Steeple” about the constuction of a overly ambitious steeple on a medieval cathedral? It addresses some of the same issues.
The message of the clerical collar has been hijacked to a great degree, but not the message of the steeple. Our local Anglican church has begun ringing the bells every Sunday morning and everyone knows what it means. It’s a great testimony in an age of mall churches and mosques.
And there certainly was no pride involved in the church universally stripping their sanctuarys of those bonnets!