What is a Building?

Written by Jim Holland (October 2014)So, we just had our groundbreaking and, God willing, in ten to twelve months we will move in to a building. We will not be gypsies anymore. We will not be renters anymore. We will have a permanent place in a real neighborhood in Collierville. Is this a big deal? Do buildings matter? Are physical structures more than they really are? Should we sacrifice so much for this? These are all good questions and I am glad you asked - so I will give you my theology of buildings. I believe that they are and can be, not only a great blessing, but a positive good.The first time in my life I noticed that “place” meant something was after I was grown, married, and had children of my own. I was just starting out with my family in the Mississippi Delta and was reading a lot of books about geography and place. This is unusual for a minister, I know, but I was haunted by the beauty of certain places and the things that had happened there. I was reading about this because my very “spiritual” friends thought I was too caught up in “matter,” as if we can be indifferent to the physical world around us. I pondered these mysteries often as I planted my first church and roamed the Mississippi Delta, with its deep sense of geography, history, and place.It was a while after this when I had an almost mystical experience on a pilgrimage back to the farm where my mother grew up. As a child this farm was like heaven to me, a city boys dream in the summer. My grandfather drove a tractor, wore over-alls, raised livestock, had a slew of hunting dogs, rolled his own cigarettes, and had a manly smell of fresh plowed earth and tobacco. As a 10-year-old boy, he let me drive his pickup to the store.  On this particular place on earth, and not anywhere else, this two hundred and fifty acres of Mississippi soil, my grandfather was born. For more than seventy years before that his father and his father’s father had raised their families on this same land after moving from North Carolina to this place in Northeast Mississippi.I never lost sight of that place in Moore’s Mill, but college, marriage, graduate school, church planting, and children all took me away and I didn’t get back there much. But that place, that geography, was like a faraway continent in my mind, a place I knew was there, but just couldn’t see.Years later after I had gained some perspective about the importance of “place” and “being from a place,” I went back the place of my childhood dreams. I remember walking where my people were from time out of mind, and it was an almost mystical feeling—like I was more than I was.  There was a “gravitas,” “weightiness” about this. It was almost like, Andrew Lytle said, “A Wake for the Living.” I was walking on the land of my dead forebears who had formed my grandparents, my parents and therefore me. It was like the rocks and the dirt were crying out to me. It was a “sacramental” type of experience. The physical place carried so much “spiritual” meaning about who I was. This was real, physical, tangible, and laden with meaning. Speech was not necessary, yet it spoke to me, jostled my memories, brought back memories, and sort of filled me with a deep knowing of who I was. Stories couldn’t do this; you had to be present physically in the place.So, you ask me if this building is a big deal. I would have to say, a lot bigger deal than just brick and mortar. Think about it - this is the place that, as a community, we will celebrate the most important and meaningful events of our lives. It is a place that will define us. More than any other thing, human beings are worship formed—that is, we all worship something and we become like whatever it is we worship. This building is the place where we will meet God, it is not the only place, but it will stand as a symbol, even when we are not there—this is where we meet and are formed in the presence of God. This is where we will baptize our children and give them to God. This is the place where we will see our children make their professions of faith and take their first communion. This is where our children will take vows and marry and return to take their place of leadership. This is where, week in and week out, we will meet as a community to bless the town we live in. This is where we will cook the best food of our lives and invite any and all to “taste and see” that God is good and the gospel of Jesus is too good to be true. And here too is the place we will celebrate the lives of people we love and weep because we will not see them until the resurrection of the dead, when God makes all things new.Is that a big deal? I suppose if God made us ghosts it would not be. But being made in God’s image, with real bodies that are forced to be one place or another, we really need physical places that, in a sense, are hallowed - that are like home, that call to us. Not in a way that is weird, but hallowed by the fact that when we walk into this building 20 years from now, so much of our identity will have been formed here, that even if no one says anything, “the stones will cry out,” and sing of God’s goodness. And that alone will heal our hearts just a bit.Winston Churchill said, “We shape our buildings and our buildings shape us.” I pray that this is true. I pray that future generations will be shaped into God’s image in this place we build.