Church Museums
by Steve Ridgell on Apr.05, 2010, under Hope
I enjoy visiting museums and I like church buildings. I never realized I could get them confused until a visit to Spain. I saw amazing church buildings with incredible architecture. They were old, and their history was incredible. There were monuments and artifacts from centuries past. It was overwhelming. They were featured stops on the city tours. So I begin asking the guides about attendance today. Some of them no longer had worship services. Some of them had small rooms partitioned off for current members. In most of them, there were more tourists during an average day than worshipers on a given Sunday.
There are a number of lessons to learn about why churches become museums. Who was it that forgot their purpose? Who lost sight of the mission? Who lost sight of Jesus? Did each new generation fail to make their faith genuine and personal? Were they more concerned with church buildings than building a church? Did they church building become the church? These are valuable questions and worth asking.
But I want to say a word to any of you who may be thinking about Jesus and church. Do not confuse the building with the church. Church is people. It is community. It is family. A church may meet in a building large or small. It may meet in homes. Or in a coffee shop. Or a school. You may visit a church building… but you are invited to become part of a church.
So if you want to visit a church building, I can tell where there are amazing museums. But if you are interested in being part of a living community as the family of God, then I can help you find that also. Write me at steve@hopeforlife.org. Or leave a comment.
Blessings,
Steve
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Really liked today’s message. Would have preferred you said “you are invited to become part of ‘the’ church”.
I am part of THE Church, the Bride of Jesus Christ looking forward for His return… but reading today’s message, made me wonder… are we as a living church indeed a family? I desire that kind of relationship and acceptance in our church… and miss it. I might be myself part of the “problem” – since today’s common attitude is “it’s nobody’s business what’s going on in my own life/home/etc.” Is it really nobody’s business?
I just grew somewhat thoughtful…
Thank you for your message.
Hey Sue — I was using “a church” in contrast to “a museum”, but as Ariana points out it is appropriate to say “the church, the body, the family”, etc.
Ariana — I very much agree that it easier to do nothing than to actually invest in helping create real family and community. Blessings on your reflections.
Hi, Steve. My family has been looking for a church and we are sadly somewhat discouraged. We live in a rural area, but the place is brimming with churches (we live in the Bible belt, so no surprise). However, we have gone to a handful churches since becoming a family in 2006. The preacher that married us invited us to the church he attends (but does not pastor) and were left with a feeling of aloofness from the pastor after we started going there and divulged certain private information about our family situation, which was a really sad thing for us. It is actually something our family seeks ministering about, and it was very disheartening to be treated like we were when we went looking for a wise, supposedly Godly person to to talk to.
Our preacher friend told me when you start ‘church shopping’ it’s very easy to fall into the habit of moving from church to church, because there will always be something you can find wrong with any church. He told us it didn’t have to be the church he was in, but we needed to find a church and settle in and see what WE could do to help the church, not necessarily the other way around. Having heard that, we’re now in this state of frozen fear, because we don’t want to be ‘church shoppers’ lol. So we just sit back and admire places from the outside and try to guess what might be a good church for us. In the meantime, we still do our family Bible studies and watch “preachin’ ” on television, and try to continue to raise our little girls in a Godly home. To try to compensate for our lack of wisdom and sense of where to turn, we have amped up the way we study with our children, so as to provide as much of a Christian upbringing as is possible until we settle in to a church. We know this is our fault for not just finding one and going, but at this point with myself and my husband it has truly come to a point of just being..frozen.
The last church we went to, the pastor “preached” three Sundays in a row about what was going on with the building fund, and how they had done market research(??) before coming to our town to find out ‘where they were needed most’. We quit going when they told us our children would have to wear a name tag with a bar code on it so they could be ‘scanned’ in and out each time, and so they could ‘keep records’ to make sure the children had been picked up or had, yes, I promise, ‘ridden the shoot’ from the third floor of the mega-church building down to the ‘landing zone’ where the parents picked them up. Sigh.
We just want a nice, normal-sized church with common, everyday people like us, who want to get together and worship the Lord. One church we went decided to split, right there in church, the VERY FIRST AND LAST time we went. I was invited to a home church by a guy I used to work with and we were considering going until my ex-husband informed me the guy had lived next door to him for a few months and he was an ex-con who was running from child support and had stopped working and started a ‘church’ so he wouldn’t have to report his whereabout to the IRS. WHAT???
Anyway, enough with my lengthy diatribe. I apologize for the novel. Please keep my family and community in your prayers. We definitely have a lot of church BUILDINGS around here, as you say.
Hey TL. Sorry for your bad experiences. The one consistent piece of advice I give people about churches is that there are no perfect ones. So pick one and remember that we about worshipping God. We are to live for His glory, not ours. I have never found a church where I agree with everything, including the one where I serve as one of the elders.
Not sure if that is helpful at all, but I do hope it is encouraging enough to help you “give it another shot”. Blessings
I am part of THE Church, the Bride of Jesus Christ looking forward for His return… but reading today’s message, made me wonder… are we as a living church indeed a family? I desire that kind of relationship and acceptance in our church… and miss it. I might be myself part of the “problem” – since today’s common attitude is “it’s nobody’s business what’s going on in my own life/home/etc.” Is it really nobody’s business?
I just grew somewhat thoughtful…
Thank you for your message.