assembly

The Church Building as a Setting for Liturgical Action

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The following comments discuss the relationship of the design of the worship space to the actions that take place there. The function and significance of these actions provide the needed guidelines for liturgical architecture.

The church building and setting for the liturgical assembly. Nothing more, but nothing less. Liturgical worship happens in space, and space is shaped into place by the meaning people discover within it. Jews and Christians have shaped space into place by discovering that the Creator abides throughout creation. Christians especially can never forget the spatial concreteness the Incarnation entails. God did not become a movement, a concept, an ideal, or even a committee, but a man of flesh and bone with a parentage, friends, a language, a country, a home. He inhabited not just a time but places, streets, rooms, countrysides, and by his presence in the flesh he changed them all. The memory of this has never died because his continuing presence by grace, faith, and sacrament still does the same in the world through his body, which is the church, enfleshed locally in the liturgical assembly.

It goes counter to Christian instinct, therefore, that the place in which the church assembles should be devoid of all evidence of his presence or that this presence should be regarded as temporary, capricious, or discrete so as not to restrict him or inconvenience the assembly. He restricted himself by becoming incarnate, and the assembly’s only inconvenience is his real absence.

Raw space becomes liturgical place through the change his presence by grace, faith, and sacrament causes. Liturgical place is thus not a monument to the pastor’s tastes or the locale in which the assembly feels most comfortable. Jesus Christ’s incarnate presence caused notable discomfort even for those who loved him best, and he is reported to have resorted to violence on one occasion when faced with the obduracy of the temple clergy’s tastes. Liturgical place belongs to the assembly only because the space it occupies is first his. He alone makes it a place by specifying its meaning as distinct from all others. To this specification the assembly can only be obedient; for it the assembly can only pray even as it cooperates with him by faith in its specification.

What the church building shelters and gives setting for is the faithful assembly, the church, in all its rich diversity of orders from catechumen to penitent, from youngest server to eldest bishop. As it meets for worship of the Source and Redeemer of all, the assembly is the fundamental sacrament of God’s pleasure in Christ on earth. The eucharistic food and drink are the sacred symbol of this ecclesial reality, which Paul calls simply Christ’s body. Christian instinct has been to house this assembly as elegantly as possible, avoiding tents, bedrooms, and school basements.

The assembly uses its place to do something in. This is the liturgy, by which the assembly celebrates the nuptials of all things with their Creator. Because the celebration outstrips being merely an instruction, a pageant, a meditation, a preachment, or an act of therapy, the assembly, as a rule, has kept its place open for movement on the part of all. Furniture is used for a public purpose and for those who find it difficult to stand or move.

The strong and elemental openness of liturgical place makes for dynamism and interest. It is a vigorous arena for conducting public business in which petitions are heard, contracts entered into, relationships witnessed, orations declaimed, initiations consummated, vows taken, authority exercised, laws promulgated, images venerated, values affirmed, banquets attended, votes cast, the dead waked, the Word deliberated, and parades cheered. It is acoustically sonorous, rarely vacant of sound or motion. It possesses a certain disciplined self-confidence as the center of community life both sacred and secular. It is the Italian piazza, the Roman forum, the Yankee town green, Red Square moved under roof and used for the business of faith. It is not a carpeted bedroom where faith may recline privately with the Sunday papers.

Find the most serviceable places for the altar, font, and chair and leave them there. Altars on wheels, fonts that collapse, and presidential chairs that fold away do not free but neuter liturgical place. Since crucial values are perennial rather than disposable, they flock with usage to sustained focal points and thus help to reduce raw space into human place. Crucial values so incarnated become roots for people’s lives. Gymnasia rarely play a profound role in most people’s maintenance of a secure identity.

Altar and font normally should be fixed, elemental, and powerful in their simplicity, free-standing to allow access from all sides, and worthy of the assembly that surrounds them. The amount of space surrounding each should be scaled to the size of the assembly. Neither altar nor font should be so close to the other as to compete for attention or to confuse each other’s purpose, dignity, and quite different kinds of liturgy. The altar is a Table to dine upon. The font is a pool to bathe in, a womb to be born from, a tomb to be buried in. Bathing and dining areas are rarely found in the same room, except in churches.

The presidential chair should be modest but not trivial. It is best located not primarily in reference to the altar but to the assembly, perhaps in an open area in the nave of the church facing both the lectern and altar along with the rest of the assembly. This would shift the ceremonial focus of the liturgy, except for the eucharistic prayer, into the midst of the assembly itself, where it seems to belong given the nature of Christian worship. Outside baptism and the eucharistic banquet, the form this worship normally takes is that of a liturgy of the Word in which the Word is heard and responded to by the whole assembly, ministers included. Locating the ministerial area and the president’s chair in the midst of the assembly may thus be the most versatile arrangement.

As the name implies, the lectern is a reading stand rather than a shrine competing with font and altar. The shrine of the gospel book is the altar. The shrine of the gospel itself is the life of the faithful assembly that celebrates the Word liturgically. The gospel book, which is “sacramental” of all this, is constantly in motion, being carried, held, opened, read from, closed, and laid rather than left somewhere behind votive lights or under lock and key.

The altar and the baptismal font are the primary spatial foci of the liturgy. The altar Table is kept free of contraptions such as elaborate bookstands, pots, cruets, plastic things, electrical apparatus, aids to piety, and the efforts of floral decorators. The book of the Word and the sacrament of the Word are adornment enough.

The baptismal area is kept free of rumpled vestments, cotton wads, stacks of reading material, and folding chairs. The pool itself is kept clean. It contains what is called “living water” not because things grow in it but because it moves to give life to those who lie in death’s bonds.

Liturgical things are designed for the assembly’s purpose. The church building houses the assembly. It is neither a museum for ecclesiastical art nor a pious attic. All it contains should possess a sober splendor congruent with the assembly and its sacred intent.

Bread and wine should be just that, not plastic disks and grape juice, not corn chips and lemonade. The assembly uses bread and wine as food and drink in the Eucharist. These should be present in form, quality, and quantity to correspond with a banquet’s usual liberality, keeping in mind, however, that this banquet’s purpose is not to fill bellies but to give thanks to the Source and Redeemer of all things. The Eucharist, like the Supper that remains its prototype, fills one with more than food, rejoices hearts with more than wine.

Cups, plates, flagons, and bread boxes should be ample. Cluttering the altar with many small cups is logistically and symbolically inelegant. Use one cup of some significance together with a clear glass or crystal flagon large enough to fill smaller cups for Communion later. The same principle holds for the bread plate: Use a single large one from which bread can be transferred to smaller plates for Communion later. The Eucharist that becomes a fast-food operation might be compared to a baptism that proceeds from eye-droppers or aerosol cans.

Vestments are sacred garments rather than costumes or billboards. They are meant to designate certain ministers in their liturgical function by clothing creatures in beauty. Their symbolic strength comes not from their decoration but from their texture, form, and color. The basic vestment of major ministers is the stole, which bishops and presbyters wear around the neck and deacons wear over the left shoulder. No other ministers wear stoles in the Roman Rite. Ministers ordained to lesser orders may wear albs. When laypersons carry out liturgical duties it is more fitting that they wear their own clothes as members of the assembly, which is no mean dignity in itself. Dalmatic, chasuble, cope, and miter can be handsome garments and should be worn as complements to the assembly whose purpose at worship is never merely utilitarian but festive.

Books are means rather than ends. Even so, they should be worthy of the Word they record and of those among whom the Word has taken flesh.

Good images are neither accidents nor fantasies but knowledgeable accomplishments that go beyond what can be observed either now or in time past. As John Meagher says, they are meant to evoke the presence of mysteries the mind has glimpsed, to remind us of the ancestral heritage of worship, to tease us out of mere thought lest we forget that history does not fence in truth, that we may not substitute critical understanding for reverence, that our knowledge is not so complete or accomplished as we often assume, and above all that our memories mix with our longings and our joys to put us in touch with our deepest sense of home.

Churches are not carpeted. While rugs and runners may occasionally enhance liturgical place by adding festal color, carpeting in quantity wearies the eye and muffles sound. Even with a good electronic sound system, which is a rarity, a carpeted church often has all the acoustical vigor of an elevator. The ambiance of a carpeted church, moreover, is too soft for the liturgy, which needs hardness, sonority, and a certain bracing discomfort, much like the Gospel itself. Liturgical ambiance must challenge, for one comes to the liturgy to transact the public business of death and life rather than to be tucked in with fables and featherpuffs. The liturgy challenges what Quentin Crisp calls the general notion of Christianity as a consolatory religion, as something nice that Jesus of Nazareth could say to those who turn to him for comfort.

Furniture is significant and kept to a minimum. Pews, which entered liturgical place only recently, nail the assembly down, proclaiming that the liturgy is not a common action but a preachment perpetuated upon the seated, an ecclesiastical opera done by virtuosi for a paying audience. Pews distance the congregation, disenfranchise the faithful, and rend the assembly. Filling a church with immoveable pews is similar to placing bleachers directly on a basketball court: It not only interferes with movement but changes the event into something entirely different. Pews are never mentioned in Roman rubrics, nor is there any record that being without pews has ever killed Christians in significant numbers.

Banners are decorative images, not ideological broadsides or opportunities for tricky piety. Rather than a festal gesture for the assembly, banners often are a form of disposable ecclesiastical art bearing disposable thoughts which foster disposable piety. Such banners should be disposed of.

Characteristics of the New Testament Church

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The church is the assembly of the “saints,” or holy ones, a people called out of the world by God. The early church was an urban movement. It held a world view that differed from that of the prevailing culture, yet it came to include people of all social classes in its radical fellowship.

Terms for the Church

The most common word for the church in the New Testament is ekklēsia, or “assembly.” It is a derivative of the verb kaleō, “call,” in the sense of those who are “called out.” The word was a general word for assemblies, but as used by the apostles it also has a theological significance. The church is the body of those who are called out from the “world,” or surrounding culture, but primarily from traditional Judaism, which the New Testament theologians considered to be unfaithful to the genuine thrust of the Lord’s covenant. Paul spoke of the new covenant community as the “Israel of God” (Gal. 6:16); he asserted that not all those who are descended from Israel are really Israelites (Rom. 9:6). Unlike the earthly Jerusalem and its religious institutions, which are in bondage, the church is the “Jerusalem above” (Gal. 4:26), an image developed as the “heavenly Jerusalem” in the epistle to the Hebrews (Heb. 12:22) and in the Revelation to John (Rev. 21:2). Although today such ideas might sound anti-Semitic, they were given expression by Jews, at least one of whom defended his Jewish credentials to the hilt (Phil. 3:4–6).

The disciples of Jesus were first called Christians (Christianoi) in Antioch (Acts 11:26). By its opponents, the Christian movement was known as the “Nazarene sect” (Acts 24:5). Other designations were “the Way” (hē hodos, Acts 9:2; 19:9, 23; 22:4), “the way of God” (Acts 18:26), and “the way of truth” (“genuine way,” 2 Pet. 2:2). New Testament writers frequently refer to the church as “the brothers” (adelphoi, Acts 15:36, 40; 16:2; 18:18; Rom. 12:1; 1 Cor. 16:11; 1 Tim. 4:6; 1 John 3:14; 3 John 5; Rev. 12:10). This term was borrowed from Jewish usage, as early Christian preaching illustrates (Acts 3:22; 7:37). In his letters to local churches, Paul addresses the assembly collectively as “the saints,” or holy ones (hoi hagioi), in the sense of those who belong to the holy God. It is not only the righteous behavior of Christians that makes them “saints,” but the fact that as God’s own people they share in that special aura of sanctity and mystery associated with the Lord’s presence, which is bound up in the Hebrew concept of holiness (qodesh). The author of Hebrews refers to the church as a worshiping body, using the term “festal gathering” (panēguris, Heb. 12:22 RSV).

Images, Concepts

The New Testament offers a panorama of images for the church that, while not sociological categories, nevertheless shed light on the way the institutional church was perceived by its spokesmen. This imagery is drawn from a wide spectrum of human experience. In a favorite metaphor of the apostle Paul, the church is a body, specifically the body of Christ, the continuing embodiment of his Spirit (1 Cor. 12:13; Eph. 4:4). From agricultural life come the images of the church as a flock protected by its Shepherd (Acts 20:28; 1 Pet. 5:2–3), as the branches nourished by the vine (John 15:1–5), or as the olive tree (Rom. 11:16–21). In an analogy to urban life, the new covenant community is compared to a city, specifically Jerusalem (Gal. 4:26; Heb. 12:22; 13:14; Rev. 21:2). Domestic life contributes the description of the church as a household of faith (Gal. 6:10; Eph. 2:19) and the family of God, in which he is Father, as well as the arresting image of the church as the bride of the Lamb (Rev. 19:7; 21:2; cf. 2 Cor. 11:2). Israel’s religious heritage suggests the portrayal of the church as a temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 3:16–17; 2 Cor. 6:16). In cosmic perspective, the church is a new creation (2 Cor. 5:17). The covenantal foundation of Israel’s faith stands behind the image of the kingdom of God (Rom. 14:17; 1 Cor. 4:20; Col. 4:11; 2 Thess. 1:5); though this expression has wider applications, it certainly includes the church. The covenant is also the framework for speaking of the Lord as Father, Shepherd, and Creator of his new people.

Evident in this pictorial language is the attempt to grasp a reality that can only be conveyed symbolically. There is a mystery and depth to the church as the community of the new covenant responding to the Spirit of Christ that flat sociological categories and theories of ecclesiastical polity cannot capture.

Social Character

When viewed as a social organization, the church of the first century exhibits certain traits that stand out as especially noteworthy. This discussion, while not a complete sociological analysis, treats some of these social characteristics.

An Urban Movement. Christianity began as an urban movement, spreading from city to city and only later infiltrating the rural areas. The history of the missionary expansion of the church is a narrative of activities carried out in an urban setting, and many books of the New Testament bear the names of prominent cities of the Greco-Roman world, some of which were quite large even by modern standards: Ephesus, Corinth, Rome. One factor accounting for this was the presence of Jewish congregations in these cities; usually a church was started as the result of the preaching of the apostles in synagogues of the Diaspora (Acts 13:14; 14:1; 17:17; 18:4). Paul, for one, was conscious of his urban heritage; being from Tarsus in Asia Minor, home of a major university, he termed himself “a citizen of no ordinary city” (Acts 21:39). He was also a Roman citizen (Acts 16:37; 22:25–26), which signified a relation to the city-state of Rome in an era before the modern nation-state had made its appearance.

A Countercultural Movement. Wherever it went, the church was a countercultural movement, espousing a worldview at odds with prevailing outlooks. In the Gentile environment, steeped in both Hellenistic philosophy and polytheistic fertility religions, Christianity proclaimed a God who was known not through speculation or mystical ritual but through his action in history to deal with the problem of human sin (Acts 17:30–31). Such a message did not fit the presuppositions of many hearers, for whom sin was not the burning issue. Within the Jewish milieu, the church’s proclamation of Jesus as the fulfillment of Israel’s covenant faith called into question the entire religious system, of which Jerusalem was the center. In their advocacy of the lordship of Christ, the apostles faced open hostility, mob action, and even imprisonment (Acts 5:17–18; 12:3–4). James, the brother of John, met death at the hand of Herod Agrippa I (Acts 12:1–2). Stephen, one of the seven appointed to administer the common life of the Jerusalem congregation, was the first witness to die for his faith, being stoned by a mob stirred up by members of the Synagogue of the Freedmen (Acts 6:9–12). When Christian evangelists got into trouble with local authorities in other parts of the Roman Empire, it was not for their beliefs, but because of the civil unrest that ensued as the result of hostility toward their activities on the part of either Jews (at Damascus, Acts 9:23–25; 2 Cor. 11:32; at Corinth, Acts 18:12–13) or pagans (at Philippi, Acts 16:16–23; at Ephesus, Acts 19:29–31). Roman officialdom regarded the Christians as a Jewish sectarian movement; the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 18:14–17) records that Gallio, the Roman administrator at Corinth, refused to intervene in what he considered an internal religious dispute.

An Inclusive Organization. The infant church’s constituency included people from a broad spectrum of economic classes. In the early days following the resurrection of Jesus, the believers established a community of property, placing their funds at the apostles’ disposal to meet the needs of the congregation (Acts 2:45; 4:34–37). Evidently, this practice was not continued, but for a time at least the Jerusalem church operated a common food service for its membership (Acts 6:1). Such policies may have been intended to demonstrate the new values of the kingdom of God, where distinctions of wealth have no place. The Jerusalem congregation included both Aramaic- and Greek-speaking Jews (Acts 6:1). Expanding from Jerusalem, the church continued to be a cross-section of Greco-Roman society. All Christians were not poor, uneducated, or disenfranchised, as Paul’s comments show; though there were “not many mighty, not many noble,” there were some (1 Cor. 1:26). The church’s assemblies were frequented by the affluent as well as the poor (James 2:2–4), and special responsibility for liberal giving is laid on those able to do so (Rom. 12:8; 1 Tim. 6:17–18). As Paul’s letter to Philemon shows, the congregation included both slaves and their masters (cf. Eph. 6:5–9; 1 Tim. 6:1). Widows with limited income (Acts 6:1; 1 Tim. 5:9–10) worshiped alongside successful businesswomen such as Lydia (Acts 16:14–15). Some members were tradesmen such as Aquila and his wife Priscilla, who, like Paul, worked in leather goods (Acts 18:2–3). Jewish priests (Acts 6:7) and synagogue officials (Acts 18:8, 17) became Christians, along with Roman officers such as Cornelius (Acts 10), government officials (Acts 8:27–39), prison administrators (Acts 16:27–34), a former companion of Herod the Tetrarch (Acts 13:1), and even members of Caesar’s household (Phil. 4:22).

A Radical Fellowship. The first-century church did not crusade against social inequities or attempt to right the wrongs of its society. Its proclamation of the gospel was a radical enough stand as it was and had economic implications of its own, especially in relation to the industry connected with idolatrous worship (Acts 19:23–27). But while there was no outward thrust to call into question social conventions such as slavery or the often inferior status of women, within its own fellowship the church manifested a radical restructuring of traditional relationships. In Christ, Paul asserted, there is neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male nor female, but all are one (Gal. 3:28). This indifference to cultural labels at the spiritual level had its impact at the social level as well. For example, women played a greater role in the leadership of the church than in the synagogue, functioning as prophets (Acts 21:8–9; 1 Cor. 11:5), praying in the assembly (1 Cor. 11:5), and giving private instruction in the principles of the faith (Acts 18:26). But this openness to new patterns was balanced by deference to traditional expectations; women were not to take authority, at least in Paul’s practice (1 Tim. 2:12), or to interrupt the assembly with questions (1 Cor. 14:34–35). The husband was viewed as the head of the wife, yet the husband was also under the headship of Christ (1 Cor. 11:3) so that the Christian marriage relationship was one of mutual respect, submission, and interdependence (Eph. 5:21–28; 1 Cor. 11:8–12). Even an unbelieving husband was “sanctified,” set apart as the Lord’s, through his wife, and vice versa (1 Cor. 7:14). Fathers were not to act toward their children in an overbearing manner (Eph. 6:4), as cultural expectations permitted.

Perhaps the most radical step, given the Jewish origins of the church, was the breaking down of the distinction between Jew and Gentile, so vigorously pursued by the sect of the Pharisees. The inclusion of Gentiles in the covenant was the “mystery” of which Paul considered himself a steward (Eph. 3:1–8) and was a cornerstone of his teaching. Peter had taken the lead in this breakthrough (Acts 10–11; Gal. 2:8), which occasioned considerable debate within the apostolic church (Acts 15:1–29; Gal. 1–2); the issue was resolved, to the apparent satisfaction of most parties, in a decision that Gentiles coming to Christ need not become Jews also, as long as they adhered to certain basic principles.