Our church (Anglican) is in the middle of a land and building campaign, and our parish has been reflecting on what that means for us. The following are some reflections I shared in a recent adult education class. This will make more sense if you have read the Beyond Bells & Smells chapter on how liturgy shapes our sense of space. But I’m wondering if people from other-than-Anglican traditions identify with this reasoning or not.
There have been many reasons marshaled to justify our purchase of land, upon which we hope to raise a building. We have heard about “coincidences” that suggest this might be the leading of God. We have thought about the evangelistic opportunities of "building something beautiful for God," a sanctuary of transformation that will send people back into the world to build something beautiful into lives whose walls are collapsing from despair and hopelessness. I have often said that a church is an institution and can have no long term viability if it doesn’t buy land and build a building.
But as Anglicans steeped in the liturgical tradition, can we not perceive an even deeper reason? God has been good to our church, and he has met us over the years, in a number of auditoriums. As I’ve noted, these auditoriums have been blessed, and they have become holy places, pieces of real estate where God meets and changes people.
An Anglican church, however, cannot be a sojourner church—that is the unique calling of some, but not us, and it is a unique and important witness to the world for some churches to be on the move on the move, so to speak, to treat buildings as mere shelters, to remember indeed that this earth is not our home, that this building is not the kingdom of heaven, that we are but sojourners, strangers in a strange land.
As Anglicans, we have a different vocation, some other essential truth of the gospel to which we are to be a witness: The reality that “the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.” We remind all that God meets people not just in their hearts and minds, but on certain pieces of real estate, and that these pieces of real estate shape and change our relationship with God, and that our relationship with God changes these pieces of real estate.
Indeed, in this day of ecological awareness, we of all people should know why we should not only care for the earth but why we care about and for the places we worship. We of all people should know that we have a mysterious relationship with land and with the stuff that ultimately comes from land–concrete, wood, glass and stone.
We Anglicans, along with the Orthodox and Roman Catholics, are the gospel witness that land matters to God, so much so he called a wandering Nomad from Ur and told him to stop wandering and to settle down in the land he would give him; the One who rescued a people enslaved in a foreign country and guided them to a land of their own; One who returned them from exile to the place from which he had driven the; One who became flesh and dwelt in that land and in no other, a land today we call Holy.
Every Anglican parish is an icon of Israel, a people with a unique call from God to not wander but to settle down, not to live in exile in strange places, but to gather together on a certain piece of land where Jesus will take on flesh and dwell among them, a place that will become holy.
It will be a place where perhaps our generation will first get to dwell, and then our children, and then our children’s children. And by dwelling in that place for generations upon generations, the people called Church of the Resurrection will know things about God that cannot be known except by dwelling in a place for a very long time. For only after living and worshipping in a certain place for generations can we begin to fathom the liturgical mystery of time and space, where here becomes there, and there becomes here, when past becomes present, and present becomes future. For in the years to come, when during the liturgy we join angels and archangels and all the company of heaven, we will recognize personally some of that company of heaven, because we and our parents and our parents parents will have worshipped with them on earth, on a certain piece of real estate that had shaped them and had shaped us because it had become holy ground.