Why Protestants Should Care About Church Architecture

C.C. Sullivan argues that in order to save the Catholic Church, we must redesign it. Literally. He is not a fan of the recent revival of traditional architecture, and criticizes those who believe “people oriented worship space” to be “blasphemous” and that traditional architecture serves a valid purpose “for the good of mankind.” His proposed solution is to recognize that “The church is changing. The times are changing. And the Catholics — and their worship halls — should move along with them.”

This argument, by a Catholic against other Catholics, brings to mind the discussion between many in the more Evangelical world on why millennials are leaving the Church. Larry Taunton’s excellent editorial in The Atlantic revealed that “students heard plenty of messages encouraging ‘social justice,’ community involvement, and ‘being good,’ but they seldom saw the relationship between that message, Jesus Christ, and the Bible.”

The students interviewed by Taunton were all former believers. They attended Church, were involved in ministries and young adult groups, but eventually they all left and rejected belief. Taunton pointed out that many of the former Christians became fed up with the vague and superficial feeling of church, and that being “Serious-minded, they often concluded that church services were largely shallow, harmless, and ultimately irrelevant. As Ben, an engineering major at the University of Texas, so bluntly put it: “I really started to get bored with church.”

A few months later, Rachel Held Evans further explored the question of why millenials are leaving the Church by explaining that the typical response of Evangelical leaders to try and capture the attention of the young with “hipper worship bands” is not only misguided and shallow, but a large part of the reason why so many are leaving the church in the first place. She explains that “Having been advertised to our whole lives, we millennials have highly sensitive BS meters, and we’re not easily impressed with consumerism or performances.”

She further pointed out that of the young evangelicals who do not leave their faith, many are abandoning the more Evangelical churches for High-Church traditions.

Sullivan’s argument for modernizing Church architecture runs counter to the conclusions drawn from these studies and experiences. If millennials are leaving the Church because it is shallow, superficial, irrelevant, and merely a cleaner version of everything they experience the rest of the week, then how is modernizing the architecture along the same lines going to help the Church in its mission to offer something of substance to the world?

Many Evangelicals have argued the data from millennials is indicative of a need for more substantial and orthodox doctrine, and serves as proof that liberal Protestantism is shallow and dying. This is all very true, but there are many other aspects of otherwise orthodox Evangelical services that are just as capable of conveying shallowness. Among these are replacing offering plates with sand-buckets, hymnals with projectors, chapels with movie-theaters, podiums with IPads, and the list goes on. We may be as orthodox as we like, but if the place we gather is not sacred then we are quite literally undermining the very ground we walk on.

In noting the importance of architecture at The Blog of the Courtier, William Newton has said, “buildings can speak to us if we train ourselves to understand what they are saying. The easiest messages are in their surface decoration, of course, but the layout of a building itself can remind us of our history.” This is impossible, however, if buildings have no history to tell us. If buildings can speak to us, we must be mindful that they can just as easily convey a superficial message as they can a substantive one.

If we are to believe anything about the Church, we should at least believe that it should serve as a rock and an anchor in the community. It should have an aura of unchanging stability to reinforce the truth that regardless of what happens in the outside world the Church will remain something unique and separated: a sanctuary. It should be a center of community where grandparents come to see their grandchildren baptized and perform in Christmas plays and where those children return years later to see their own grandchildren do the same. Through all this it should both become something familiar, yet remain something of a mystery.

But the Church can be none of these things if we cede that the building itself is merely a matter of personal taste and something that may be abandoned or torn down whenever the tides of fashion dictate. How can the Church be a source of stability if we admit the very building we call a sanctuary is not safe from the ever changing whims of the outside world? If religion is not above all this then what substance can it possibly claim to teach?

It may be argued that we no longer live in a world where people are tied to place, and that even if the building remains, the people will come and go so frequently that it no difference is made. However, if one really stops to think through the statement they will realize it is a much better argument against the new world than it is against the old Church. As Rachel Held Evans pointed out, millennials have been advertised to quite enough. They have grown up in a world of cheap fakes that are detached from both place and meaning. Offering them more of the same will not win them over.

My fellow Protestants would do well to stand with Traditionalist Catholics in upholding the value of architecture and aesthetics in the service. We are famous for believing that substance trumps form, often at the unfortunate expense of other truth. However, if the substance keeps leaking out we should not be too proud to admit that our form may need a little patching. It is not necessary to draw an entirely Catholic conclusion to remember the fact that Christ was not like the foolish man who built his house on shifting sands. He built His Church on a rock.