Came across this post from an architecture/urban planning blog, and it got me to thinking about our foundations. I have had a lot of conversations recently about the church (community/cultural organism, as opposed to a building/meeting place/Sunday morning talk) and have been pretty good about delineating between those two definitions that are, in the Bible Belt, almost interchangeable. However, this post got me to thinking about why Jesus used an architectural parable (houses on rock/sand) to explain God’s Logos and how He Himself is referred to as the Cornerstone.
“I’ve been going through old magazines to find articles that I hope to read, re-read, or even incorporate into the final edits of the BLDGBLOG Book – and so tonight I came across the January 2007 issue of Metropolis.
There, we read about the ten greatest engineering feats of architectural history – including this short blurb about Hagia Sophia, in Istanbul:
The building was constructed of masonry, which shifted constantly during construction and thereafter. Today we use “switch-on gravity analysis,” where we imagine a structure built on the Moon and then digitally move it over to the Earth in a fraction of a second, and suddenly it’s loaded. But a structure like this changed its characteristics during construction, almost minute by minute. I can’t image [sic] how people could have had the courage to construct it.
It’s fascinating to think that the very thing under construction is in the process of altering itself. The structure has taken on agency, in other words: moving, shifting, becoming something other than what you intended it to be. That which you add to, shifts; that which supports you, changes.”
Obviously a bit of an existential and humanistic conclusion at the end of the blogpost, but it made me think through the 2000 year old structure that is the church. We look at it, in all its divided, re-divided, tacked-on rooms, all with different historical textures and cultural styles created during the that time, and sometimes we tend to think that the old parts are ugly, outdated and anachronistic, the other parts are wrong (or at least less “right”, and that the structures we inhabit or build somehow “better” or more correct or true. But is it really so? If the Truth is our foundation, and Jesus the cornerstone that keeps the structure from shifting, isn’t the end result (whatever and whenever that is) something that will be (and is) a sight to behold and treasure? Why do we insist on equating relativism with relevance or, alternately, continue to broadcast the Truth in AM radio when the world watches in HD? In the end, we think we have (or hearken back to) a better plan for the church, but the Builder and the Building itself is always exceeding it.
All to say, we are trying to teach Rory (and ourselves) how to recognize, appreciate and cultivate beauty, whether in hairy striped caterpillars or hairy church community and history.
