Is Having a Church Building "Missional"?

8.22.17

                I remember when our new little church plant signed our first lease. We leased a large community meeting room in the downtown bus station on Sunday mornings. They were nice enough to throw in a small storage space that we could use during the week. But I’ll never forget the sense of trepidation in signing that 12-month lease for that room! We were less than a year old, we had barely started, we were planting an inner city church, we were targeting homeless people, and we didn’t exactly have a lot of cash flowing in.

                I remember too, the one Sunday when our usher excitedly said, “Well, the offering that came in today is enough to cover today’s rent!”

                As a church that specifically seeks to be mission-oriented in our city, we talk a lot and do a lot outside the walls of the church building. We cast vision for people to go outside the walls of the church and reach out. We challenge people to live out their faith Monday through Saturday, not just on Sundays when they’re in the church building. So I think it’s fair when people ask questions about the purpose and, frankly, the financial piece, that a church building requires. Sometimes people ask questions like:

·         Wouldn’t it be better if we just had a house church? Why do we need a church building?

·         A church building requires so much money for maintenance. Wouldn’t it be better financially if we didn’t have to care for a church building?

·         Doesn’t the building distract us from mission?

As a church planter who started with ten people in our living room, I’ve wrestled with all these questions. I think they are great questions, and I think that Christians must keep asking these questions! We always need to ask:

·         Does this building help or hinder the mission?

·         Is our financial spending responsible, godly, and in alignment with the direction of the Holy Spirit?

We have experienced both having a church building and not having a church building.

·         We started in a house and did house church discipleship for about 10 months. In that time we held Life Groups in various homes in the target neighborhood.

·         We moved to a storefront that gave us meeting space on both Sundays a through the week, but it was only two rooms. We could have two events going on at once, but otherwise, Life Groups and other meetings needed to be held outside the church building.

·         We then moved to our current location, which was larger than we needed at the time. We purchased this building, taking on a mortgage for the first time.

Here are a few ways that having our own building has helped us accomplish mission:

·         We are intentionally located in a low-income, core city area. We intentionally located within walking distance of several missions. We intentionally located on the Number 1 bus line: one of the few that operates consistently on Sundays. Our church building is actually more accessible for our community than homes. Whenever we want to make sure that all of our congregation can get to an event, we hold it at the church. While we do have a few Life Groups that meet in homes, we realize that those groups tend to naturally exclude marginal people without transportation.

·         We have three tenants that rent space in our building. We house: a non-profit that does job placement for hard-to-employ people age 55+, a counseling office, and a legal office that specializes in immigration law. We also rent a room to a community organization that promotes and teaches breastfeeding for moms of infants who are underserved in our city. These leases do several things: 1) they help us provide for the cost of the building, and 2) they bring in all sorts of wonderful people from all kinds of cultural and religious backgrounds, and 3) we are serving our community in ways we wouldn’t be otherwise: professional counseling, acupuncture, legal aid, breastfeeding coaching, and employment. It’s been a remarkable expansion of the ministry that we already offer at the church.

·         Also, as kingdom people, we have a call to beautify the place God has given to us. We believe that improving our building has contributed to the welfare of our community. Any investment we make brings the wholeness of God’s kingdom shalom. When we first moved into our current building, a landscaping company helped us put in a small landscaped area. They brought trees, bushes, perennials, decorative grasses, and sod, and transformed what was once an ugly strip of broken parking lot into a beautiful garden. The neighbors noticed. This is a way we participated with God’s coming kingdom!

·         Finally, a church building is helpful because visitors feel safe in it. When we were meeting in homes, we struggled to get our neighbors to come. In our core city environment, a “legitimate” church has a building. It was only cults that didn’t. Even though most of our neighbors were unchurched, they “knew” that if they wanted to connect with God, that a church was the expected place to go. We found that there were cultural barriers to house church meetings that a church building helped us break.

I do think it’s possible for a church building to get too much focus. I do think it’s possible for a church building to get people off mission. But I also think that a church building can most certainly contribute to mission and be a direct piece of outreach in the community. Our current church building has established us as a presence in our community. It has communicated to our very transient neighborhood, “We are here to stay.”