RE-PITCHING THE TENT, a book review
enquirer would have every reason for treating with suspicion a community so out of step with its surrounding culture that is has become little more than an (occasionally) living exhibit in a folk museum.
(c) Inconsistency; because every previous generation in the history of the Christian Church has ruthlessly adapted church buildings to suit current theological and liturgical norms, a Christian generation which suddenly ceases to do this is unfaithful to its own tradition. It has thereby abrogated a previously universal pattern of continual evolution.
(d) Unfaithfulness; a Christian community which seeks to create an island of change in a sea of change - an attitude in which the unaltered building is often the most potent symbol - is unfaithful at the deepest level to the Good News of Jesus Christ, who proclaimed new life through total change - metanoia. Such a community despises its own birthright.
(e) Spiritualization; reference the late Cardinal Heenan's remarks that all Jesuit houses tended to have about them an air of 'refined squalor'. This arose from a conviction that there was no time for bothering about mere buildings when there was so much work and prayer to get done. The vast majority of our church buildings could likewise be similarly described. In too many church communities indifference to the environment of worship is a vice dressed up as a 'spiritual' virtue.
In countless parish churches up and down the land, intelligent men and women, apparently leading otherwise normal lives, are (consciously or not) involved in strange and deeply disturbing practices, perpetuating a religious observance which is marginalized, eccentric, inconsistent, and unfaithful to its own origins. For the first time in history we have a Church that is content to operate out of places of assembly which contradict, in their layout and design, the Church's own message and theological self-understanding.
We are the first Christian generation which has attempted to separate liturgical design from theology; we proclaim one thing in our preaching and our prayers, and quite another in our weekly polishing of the long-abandoned pulpit......Current attitudes betray a fatal lack of connection between theology and life; a church fit only for the heritage trail.
Architecture and evangelism are also too easily put asunder, and good evangelists often make poor hosts. Inspired and tireless in their efforts to bring people into the community of faith, they bring their new friends home to a building which has no facilities for hospitality, which is full of unused and
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