521 - True and False Witness: Architecture and the Church

True and False Witness: Architecture and the Church
By Robert McAffe Brown

"Here, then, is the challenge to the church architect as I would see it today: Can you give us a church building that reflects pilgrimage rather than arrival? That immerses us in the world rather than dividing us off from the world? That thrusts on us the posture of servant rather than master? That makes us conscious of what it means to be a creative minority rather than suggesting to us that we really should be running the show? That keeps us on the march rather than giving us the illusion of rootedness?"

WHAT does it mean to give witness? It is standard procedure to point out that our word "witness" is a translation of the Greek marturia, from which we likewise get the word "martyr," thereby suggesting that a witness is one who is willing to pay a heavy price to manifest that to which he is committed. He will offer himself, to the very limit, for the sake of what he believes.

How, then, could his witness go astray and become "false witness"? It would seem that this could happen in one of two ways. The witness could be false if it was a witness to the wrong thing; we might, for example, say that a committed Nazi, no matter how committed, was bearing witness to a false God, a false Messiah, something that should be destroyed rather than upheld, and that he was thus giving false witness. Or the witness could be false if it did not in fact

With some minor revisions this was the major public address at the National Conference on Religious Architecture, San Francisco, April, 1966. The Conference was sponsored by the Commission on Church Building and Architecture of the National Council of Churches, the Guild for Religious Architecture, and the American Institute of Architects. Robert McAfee Brown is Professor of Religion in the Special Programs in Humanities, Stanford University, California.

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point to what it was supposed to point, but rather to something else. Thus a man who claimed he was trying to witness to the power of love, but did so in a snarling or calculating or destructive manner, would not really be witnessing to love, and that witness likewise would be false.

When we talk about "false witness," we are using it in the second of these two ways; we are not talking about the falsity of that to which we witness, but rather to the falsity of our ways of witnessing. The witness becomes false when it does not in fact communicate truly, when it distorts rather than clarifies, when it makes grotesque rather than clear, when it corrupts rather than purifies.

In the light of this distinction, I propose to do three things. First, I shall try to describe what seems to me the nature of the witness the church is called upon to make in this day and age. Secondly, from that side of me which is firmly planted in the secular world I will indicate some of the ways in which this witness appears to be falsified. Finally, I shall try to suggest some of the dimensions of the alliance between the churchman and the architect that might begin to transform the false witness into a true witness.

I

I shall not try to make the case for Christian faith in our day, nor shall I try to demonstrate that God is still alive after all, nor shall I argue that the church is an integral part of the Christian faith. I shall take these things for granted (a rather novel theological stance these days) so that we can ask ourselves: "What kind of witness should the church be making to the world today? What images best describe the proper role of the church in contemporary life?" Let me briefly and arbitrarily suggest six.

(1) The first image is a very ecumenically-oriented understanding of the church's stance in the contemporary world. This is the notion of the church as existing in diaspora, in dispersion, scattered across the face of the earth, a tiny minority in comparison to the whole of mankind. I call it an ecumenically-oriented image because it is espoused by such theologians as Karl Rahner, a German Jesuit; Hans Reudi-Weber, a Swiss missionary now with the World Council of Churches; Thomas Merton, a Cistercian monk; Richard-Shaull, a Presbyterian who shuttles between Princeton and Latin America; and Stephen Neill, a Bishop of the Church of South India,

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who shuttles all over the place. "Christendom," a culture suffused with the Christian faith and the power of the Christian institution of the church-"Christendom," these thinkers say, is dead. Christians are not in the driver's seat. Our culture is no longer, if it ever was, Christian. Rather, Christians are dispersed through a culture that is at best indifferent, at worst hostile, to the church (though in certain moments I want to contend that hostility is easier to cope with than indifference). We Christians are a tiny fraction of mankind, and in proportion to the world's population, we are becoming a tinier fraction each year.

It is hard to persuade Americans to take this image seriously, where things seem to be going so well for the churches, but I must assert that I find it inescapable as a descriptive image. And we Americans need to see this particular handwriting on our national wall, if we are to face up to where the church will be, and what its consequent role must become, for the next quarter of a century.

(2) A second way of describing the contemporary posture of the church is to see it as both gathered and dispersed. We have been accustomed to thinking of the church as the community that is gathered together, that draws apart for a while to gain strength, and that finds its meaning focused in those periods of being together in prayer and fellowship. The very word itself, ek-klesia, means "called out." Where do you find God? You go "to church" to find him; he is in the sanctuary, the holy place, and you are made aware of his presence when you get away from what the preacher in Beyond the Fringe called the "hurly-burly of life."

Now it is not to be denied that there is a value in this, But it is also not to be denied that somehow it has all gotten out of focus, or at least out of proportion. And so the emphasis in recent ecumenical writing has been on the double theme of gathering and scattering. The German gets the spirit well-Sammlung und Sendung. What is beginning to become clear is that we need a corresponding new emphasis on the dispersion end of the pole, the scattering, the being sent. The gathering is for the sake of the sending. Otherwise, we are turning our back upon the world-God's world-and trying to find our real meaning in escape from it. We can make the point also by saying that whereas the church used fundamentally to be the place to which we came, now in our day it needs to become fundamentally the place from which we go.

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(3) The theme can be illustrated in a third way. Protestants will recall that at the time of the Reformation the Reformers elucidated the so-called marks of the church, those things which indicated where the church was to be found. There were invariably two marks-the church is found where the Word is truly preached and where the Sacraments are rightly administered-to which Calvin added a third, that it was found where those so gathered lived under a discipline. But what we have in such descriptions of the church is no more than a description of the gathered community. And in our day, a number of people have been suggesting that there must be another mark to distinguish the church. (Those on the theological left can find the point made by Colin Williams, those on the right by Karl Barth.) This third mark, without which the church is not truly the church, is mission, being sent forth. Barth (to give a nod to the right), elsewhere so much the son of the Reformers, berates his forebears for their oversight at this point:

What has become of the decisive New Testament saying in 2 Con 5: 19 that it was the world which God reconciled to Himself in Jesus Christ, or of the well known John 3: 16 that it was the world which He loved so much in such a way that He gave for it his only begotten son... The classical doctrine seems not to envisage any relationship, or at least any basic and essential relationship of the institution and community of salvation to the world outside... There can be no doubt that we are here confronted by a noticeable gap in the Evangelical dogmatic tradition (Church Dogmatics, IV/3, part 2, pp. 766-767).

So Barth, and others with him, insist that the stress on being sent forth, on mission, is a necessary mark of the church, and not simply a kind of auxiliary appendage:

In every respect, even in what seems to be purely inner activity like prayer and liturgy and cure of souls and biblical exegesis and theology, its activity is always ad extra. It is always directed extra muros, to those who are not, or not yet, within, and visibly perhaps never will be (ibid., p. 780).

(4) Barth's reference to the extra muros, to going outside the walls, suggests yet another way of putting it, in an image drawn from the New Testament. The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews says, "Jesus also suffered outside the gate in order to consecrate the people through his own blood. Therefore let us go forth to him outside

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the camp, bearing abuse for him" (Heb. 13: 12-13). That comes as a real surprise. We are accustomed to saying, "If you want to find Jesus, come within the church, withdraw from the pagan atmosphere outside, enter, and learn of him, withdraw into the safety of the fortress. But the New Testament says something quite different. "You want to find Jesus?" it asks. "Then you must do what he did. You must leave the security of the fortress, you must go outside the camp,' outside the walls. God is not working in an exclusive way within your midst, but in an inclusive way beyond your midst. In his own day, the place he was most strikingly at work was not in the synagogue, or even in the Sermon on the Mount, but on the city dump heap where they crucified him. That's where you find him. Go forth to Jesus outside the camp."

(5) The context of this passage, and the verses that immediately follow it, give us perhaps the most widespread contemporary image of the church. This is the image (so appropriate to a time of diaspora, of gathering and dispersing, of mission and of going "outside the camp") of the pilgrim people. One cannot read the letter to the Hebrews without this image becoming solidly fixed in his mind, nor can one read contemporary theology-either Catholic or Protestant-without the same result. Look at two emphases contained within it.

First, take the noun. At the Vatican Council, even my non-Latinized ear became attuned to the constantly reiterated refrain, populus Dei, the people of God. This is the image par excellence for Vatican II. Hierarchy is no longer the basic image, it ever was. No, the church is first of all the people of God, the whole fellowship of the faithful, the priesthood of all believers (and how hard it was to attune myself to hearing that familiar Reformation tag on the lips of bishop after bishop). The church is not the clergy plus the leftovers. The church is the whole people, ordained to a universal priesthood by baptism, within which total priesthood some are set apart to further tasks and responsibilities.

But with only the noun, the concept could easily become static. The people are also a pilgrim people. The people of God never arrive, they are only and always on the march. Back in 1947 at the Whitby Conference of the International Missionary Council, John A. Mackay put the point this way:

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The whole church must brace itself to face the frontier. That is to say, it must become a mobile missionary force, ready for a wilderness life. It must be ready to march towards the place where the real issues are and where the most crucial decisions must be made. It is a time for us all to be thinking of campaign tents rather than of cathedrals (Renewal and Advance, edited by Ranson, p. 203; italics added).

And commenting on the need for the church to venture forth in new directions and put many of her conventional structures up for grabs, the New Delhi report on Witness, speaking for the World Council of Churches, put it this way:

This [willingness] is only one illustration, but an important one, of how the Church may become the Pilgrim Church, which goes forth boldly as Abraham did into the unknown future, not afraid to leave behind the securities of its conventional structures, glad to dwell in the tent of perpetual adaptation, looking to the city whose builder and maker is God (p. 90, New Delhi Report).

The Church, then, is the people of God on the march, on pilgrimage, unwilling to dig its foundations too deep in any one place, willing to go wherever there is need or God calls to it, glad (in the wonderful phrase of the New Delhi report) "to dwell in the tent of perpetual adaptation." The phrase that has entered both Catholic and Protestant discussion is the phrase that must always describe the church, ecclesia semper reformanda-the church always in process of reformation, never complete, never pure, needing as Cardinal Meyer reminded the council fathers (in a quotation from Augustine) to pray until the end of time, "Forgive us our sins."

(6) A final image that can help elucidate what it means to talk of the pilgrim people is the image of the servant church. The church must understand herself not as one who comes to dominate, to be lord and master, but to serve, and, when occasion demands, to suffer in the process of serving. Remember the tag end of the verse from Hebrews, "Let us go forth to [Jesus] outside the camp, bearing abuse for him." Bishop after bishop at Vatican II, particularly from the underprivileged sections of the world, reiterated the plea, "We must give up our pomp, our ceremony, our splendor; we must become the church of the poor; we must identify with those in need. We must serve rather than dominate." The Council document on The Church in the World Today acknowledges that in many places the

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church has had worldly power in the past, and in a few it still has such power today. But the document goes on to insist that the church is willing to surrender such power when it stands between the gospel and those whom the gospel should be reaching. The church, then, must be willing to make this act of identification with those in need, to become the champion of the outcast, rather than the defender of the privileged, to identify more fully with the needy rather than simply with the affluent.

Those, then, are half a dozen ways of describing a kind of growing consensus about the church's role in today's world. Is there a way to draw them together, a way that will indicate the stress found in all of them on a connection between the people of God and the world? I think there is, and I mention it because it may help when we come to relate all of this to architecture. I think the key is found in a proper understanding of the meaning of liturgy. Remember that the word combines the root form of laos and ergos, and thus means "the people's work." Leitourgia, liturgy, is what people do wherever they are, and it is a linguistic catastrophe that it has come by us to be associated only with what people do in church. No, liturgy is fulfilling jury duty, playing center field in Candlestick Park, singing praise, washing diapers, counseling the sick, making love, designing buildings, reading Holy Scripture, checking footnotes. Leitourgia, properly understood, therefore, is a way of describing the wholeness, the oneness, the indissolubility of all life. If it is sometimes improperly used as an escape, it can properly be used as that which tics all life together. Bonhoeffer saw the point clearly back in the '30s: "Only he who cries out for the Jews," he said, "has the right to sing Gregorian chant." Only he who identifies himself with oppressed minorities, today, we might also say, has a right to sing "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God."

Here is one of those points where the Lord's Supper so strikingly does bind it all together. For even if we try to escape "into church" to get away from all that distraction outside, we are not permitted the luxury of escape. For the high point of our worship is not something ethereal-beautiful music, a pulpit voice, a lovely window. The high point is eating and drinking-the bread that intrudes from outside and represents Christ's body also represents sowing, and harvesting, and baking ovens, and teamsters' unions, and economics and politics, and those who have no bread, and all the rest. That

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which God uses to make his son present in our midst, is part and parcel of that secular, mundane, earthy existence that pursues us right up to the Lord's Table. All that I have been trying to say thus far seems to me summed up in what that represents-that since God uses the earth to communicate his presence to us, all that is of the earth must therefore be our immediate concern.

II

Where does the challenge to this witness come from? It comes, of course, from sensitive voices within the church, but it comes also from sensitive voices outside the church, and we must dare to believe that God raises up prophets in our midst who do not have the ordinarily accepted credentials, and yet who may be saying the things we most need to hear.

These voices tell the churches that they are not, in fact, making the witness they profess to be making. What you do, and how you act, these voices tell the church, are a far cry from what you say.You have fine words, but they are no more than words. If you are making a witness, it can only be described as a false witness. Let me now switch hats and speak from the perspective of that secular world where I live and move and have my being, and try to indicate why the witness seems a false one.

(1) Take, first, the image of the church in diaspora, a tiny minority, a scattered handful, across the face of the earth. That certainly doesn't describe the way the American churches act. The presupposition of American church life is still the presupposition of Christendom, that the culture is one in which religion is supposed to dominate, in which the church is to stake out its claims in the world, to bold on to its place, and-if necessary-to try to recover any lost territory. The church appears jealous of its privileges in society and seems to fight any attempt to challenge them. Take the touchy issue of tax exemption. Why is the church entitled to be excused from carrying its share of the tax burden of the country? Why should the church be given a free ride by the non-churchmen? Why should non-churchmen have to pay higher taxes because First Presbyterian or Second Methodist preempts a downtown block and builds a parking lot on it? The notion of diaspora simply doesn't ring descriptively true. Churches still act either as though they were in the saddle, or else give the impression of try-

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ing desperately to regain the position from which they may have been temporarily unseated.

(2) What about the linage of being gathered and dispersed? Does that really describe the church? Most churches simply haven't come to terms with what this ought to mean. They stress one or the other, and since each needs the other, both end up deficient. For some churches, gathering is what really matters. Thus in gathering they put on a different set of postures, employ a different vocabulary (usually Elizabethan), and try to shut out the world that elsewhere so mercilessly beats in upon them. They insulate themselves by thick walls, or colored windows, or pulpit generalities, or carefully controlled membership rolls. And they leave with a cozy feeling that lasts until they've gotten clear back out to that parking lot, whether tax-free or not.

At the other end of the spectrum are an increasing number of churches that are gung-ho for dispersion. They are concerned for social justice and civil rights. They demonstrate against our policy in Vietnam. They have restored the concern for relevance. But it becomes increasingly difficult to discern what is unique about their witness, in what ways they conceive of the church as anything more than a particularly dedicated social service agency. Do they do anything that can't perhaps be done better by people with more expertise if less good will? In the concern for breadth and involvement where is the corresponding concern for depth and integrity?

What we find, I suggest, is many churches concerned with gathering, and many churches concerned with dispersion-but very few churches searching for creative ways to relate these two concerns to one another. So they offer false witness-a truncated and distorted version of the nature and mission of the church.

(3) Move on to the "marks" of the church. Word and Sacrament are particularly the actions of the gathered community, and there have been some remarkable recoveries in our day of a new concern for both a theology of the Word and a theology of the Sacraments. But isn't it descriptively true that in most churches mission is still seen as an appendage? When one moves beyond the hard core of the activists, there is a solid segment of resistance to taking the notion of mission, going forth, with radical seriousness. The question was bluntly and honestly put to me by a Southern Baptist seminarian recently. In response to my plea for the involvement of the church

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in identifying with the victims of injustice, he asked, "But isn't it the major task of the church to proclaim the gospel?" And my response can only be, how better proclaim it than by trying to embody it? Proclamation is not just saying certain Christian words, and in our day and age a deed is liable to "proclaim" a good deal more than a word. A Catholic priest and a Methodist pastor marching with Mexican-American Roman Catholics to Sacramento are "Proclaiming" more directly that Christians must fight injustice, than all the sermons and pronouncements we have been making for decades.

But that, I discover, is still very much a minority viewpoint. And so the challenge in this area goes: you people talk a good line but you are notably deficient when it comes to deeds. How often do you put your corporate name and corporate structures on the line, at risk, in controversial matters? Are you really willing to pay more than lip service to the notion that mission is as integral to the church as Word and Sacrament, and that lack of mission makes your profession of Word and Sacrament thin and indecisive?

(4) The momentum builds up when we turn to the image of Christ as "outside the camp." Don't the churches really perpetuate the notion that Christ is found inside the camp, and that those inside are somehow to take him to those outside? But if one really takes seriously the New Testament contention that God has reconciled the world to himself, that the "principalities and powers" have been overcome, this condescending willingness of Christians to take Christ out to the world falls little short of blasphemy. Surely it must be asserted in New Testament terms that he is out there already, and that the most that Christians can do is to try to uncover the places he is already at work, make his activity more manifest for all to see, and identify themselves with those things he is doing. So here the charge would go: You churches seem to treat Christ as a private possession, that (with a kind of Lady Bountiful attitude) you will condescend to share with others. What entitles you to claim this kind of monopolistic control over the divine activity? What entitles you to assert that God gives no other witness of himself than that over which you claim to have possession? By what right do you set aside certain places, and call them holy places, and imply that other places are thereby rendered profane? How can you so narrowly circumscribe the extent and scope of God's activity?

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(5) The image of the church as the pilgrim people further sharpens the indictment. All Christians today proclaim the priesthood of all believers. But how seriously do the churches really take this? When Christians talk about "the church" getting "involved," doesn't this still basically mean the clergy? When people say "the church" was at Selma, or that "the church" was at Sacramento on Easter Sunday with the grape pickers, does this mean more than that there was a liberal sprinkling of clerical collars and nuns in the crowd? Doesn't "the involvement of the church" still mean a public stand by the Catholic bishops, or a statement by the National Council of Churches, the former group being exclusively clerical and the latter predominantly so? Isn't there still an ingrained clericalism that is far from being rooted out? So isn't all the talk about this being the age of the laity an instance of false witness?

When we move from noun to adjective, from people to pilgrim people, the issue is yet more clearly joined. Is there anything less descriptive of American Christianity than the notion that American Christians live as pilgrims rather than as permanent tenants? American churches give the distinct impression of being very deeply and permanently planted in specific soil, and the solidity of the buildings is only a symbolic indication of how little seriousness they attach to the notion of peregrination. One has only to examine the unwillingness of any Protestant denomination to evaluate past ways of doing things in an atmosphere of genuinely putting things up for grabs, to -realize how little venturesomeness it possesses. The sense that Christians are to be living expectantly, venturing forth into unknown futures, is far from the American experience. If the image of the pilgrim people of God is the dominant theological image today, American Christianity gives the lie to it the more it becomes tied down to a given place, saddled with given forms and uncritically accepted structures.

(6) If there is false witness there, consider that it is almost grotesque to offer the servant image as a description of American Christianity. When churches increasingly advertise "comfortable overflow chapels," when they still opt for clergy discounts in department stores, when they spend four times as much on themselves as they give away (which I think would be a reasonably generous estimate of the proportion of most church budgets), it is pretty clear that they are still more interested in dominating than in serving. Is this not

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the epitome of the charge of false witness, that American churches can have the temerity to describe their role as that of servant?

I suggested, you will remember, that a proper understanding of leitourgia would help to tic all this together. Is that proper understanding present? Is not leitourgia still thought of as what the Christian does "in church"? Does not liturgy still serve to insulate the Christian from the world outside? Doesn't it really become the "sacred moment," rather than being the moment that invests all other moments with sacrality? Is not this the point of most fundamental betrayal, this point where Christians still try to separate secular and sacred, at the point where actually they can be most authentically interfused?

Those seem to me, in capsule form, some of the charges that can be brought against the church, as a bearer of false witness. Current theological understanding of the church presents magnificent possibilities; indeed the very magnificence of the possibilities renders more tragic the gap between possibilities and performance.

III

I now turn, in conclusion, to ask whether there might be some ways in which a theology of integrity and an architecture of integrity could help to dispel this false witness. And rather than six times around and home, let me now try to pull together what seems to me the burden of the six points, and then ask how, in terms of that burden of concern, architecture has a significant role to play.

The thrust and the force of the six images I have suggested, drawn together in the basic meaning of leitourgia, seems to me to center on this: that the theology of the church in our day is a theology of the church as existing for the sake of the world. The church is not to be a haven of retreat from the world, but rather that instrumentality within the world where man's worldly situation can be most comprehensively understood, and where the dynamic for the transformation of that world can be most effectively transmitted. The church that exists for its own sake, rather than for the sake of the world, is bearing false witness. The concerns of man in the world, then, must be the concerns of the church. To whatever degree the church is witness to God, to Christ, to the transcendent, to sin and redemption, to new life and eternal life-to just that degree those concerns must be graphically and relentlessly related to the here and

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now. This, it seems to me, is what lies behind the images of diaspora, of being gathered and dispersed, of centering on mission, of going outside the camp, of being the pilgrim people and the servant. This is what leitourgia tries to tie together as all of a single piece. And the indictment, the charge, is that we have been terrifyingly false to that witness.

How then does our common concern here about church building, about the creative use of space, either foster the continuation of the false witness or help us to replace false witness with true witness?

Let us face the stickiest question first. Should the church we have been describing-the servant church, the pilgrim church, the church going outside the camp-build buildings at all? Isn't the very notion of a pilgrim people more compatible, as John A. Mackay has said, with tents than cathedrals? I shall not, however, stay with this question overlong. For the real question is not: do we build or don't we? The real question facing us is: when we build, how can we build with the most integrity?

Even so, no churchman today can brush aside the mounting pressures on us to reconsider whether we are not building overmuch. The questions that are thrust upon us are such questions as these: Most bluntly, are not the immediate needs of starving men today such that we must never take for granted our right to build, when others cannot even take for granted the right to live? Are we not approaching the time when we will have more buildings than we need, especially as the disparity between the number of persons and the number of Christians increases in the diaspora situation? Is there not a danger that we have come to identify the church too much with the building, and that we feel too dependent upon a building if we are to consider ourselves truly a church?

I simply say that every decision to build another church has to be made out of long struggling with those and similar questions. I do not think that in the interrelated modern world in which we live, we can assume that we have the right to build; on the contrary, I think we have to justify such a decision in the light of the current theology of the church and the current state of the world. Neither that theology nor that world will allow us to take for granted that we can live lavishly. We must ask ourselves again and again whether a beautiful church is truly an invitation to worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness, or an indictment of our callous lack of concern

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for the fact that the world around the church is made ugly by our indifference to human need. In an era when our comfort is built upon the misery of others, those who enter the servant church must not perpetrate the false witness of making the servants' quarters too lavish.

This immediately suggests, secondly, that what we build needs to give expression to the images that have emerged in the self-consciousness of the church today. Here is where the architect has an incredibly creative opportunity. Can he create a building that is not false witness, that makes it impossible, for example, for people to be gathered but not to be dispersed? What architectural forms would suggest that Christ is to be sought "outside the camp"? How could a church be designed so that the world will intrude, as it must, rather than be obliterated, as it has often tended to be? How can the building be expressive not of clerical domination but of lay activity and involvement, so that it witnesses to the fact that the church is the people, and neither the clergy nor the building, at least until it is first of all the people? How can a permanent building be expressive of the impermanence of the Christian's location in any one spot? How can we build so that witness is given to the reality of God, and yet build in such a way that we do not "locate" him in a sacred setting with the implication that he is not to be found except in a sacred setting? How can we, in other words, use the vehicles of the secular so that their secularity is not destroyed, but that through their very secularity, rather than despite it, witness is made to God? And if there is a gap between artistic creativity and so-called "religious art," must we not call attention to that gap, challenge mediocrity, and even highlight the problem of the present distance between the churchman and the artist, rather than ignoring the need to challenge artist and churchman into a new kind of partnership?

Our second problem then, is how to build in terms that are faithful to the church's understanding of itself today. And that problem is probably more difficult now than at any other time in Christian history, since we stand at the beginning of an era recognizing that the church not only gathers but must disperse, that there must not only be Word and Sacrament (which are easy to provide for architecturally), but also mission (which is harder to express architecturally), that Christ is not just found inside, but rather that it is inside that we discover that he is found outside. Here, then, is

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the challenge to the church architect as I would see it today: Can you give us a church building that reflects pilgrimage rather than arrival? That immerses us in the world rather than dividing us off from the world? That thrusts on us the posture of servant rather than master? That makes us conscious of what it means to be a creative minority rather than suggesting to us that we really should be running the show? That keeps us on the march rather than giving us the illusion of rootedness?

If we need, then, to build less, but to build with a greater sense of letting the building reflect the true nature of the church, which means that we must build more simply (a garment fit, so to speak, for a servant), I suggest thirdly that we must now build more ecumenically.

In commenting on a theology of the church today I have deliberately drawn on both Catholic and Protestant resources, and on a variety of Protestant denominational resources. Thus an ecumenical presupposition has been behind every comment I have made. This is built into any understanding of the church today. And this, too, must begin to receive fresh expression in our building. God willing, the number of different Protestant denominations is gradually going to decrease through mergers and re-unions. So for theological, as well as economic reasons, the multiplicity of denominational structures must diminish. And this is a challenge to both the churchmen and the architects: can we not find ways to make multiple use of our new buildings?

There is surely no space in modern society less efficiently used than church space. Much of it lies idle six days a week. Why is it impractical for a number of congregations to use the same physical facilities? There may be a few scheduling problems on Sunday morning, but is the 11 o'clock hour so sacrosanct that the facilities could not be used throughout the day by different groups, let alone other days as well? In a day when we talk about becoming more fully united in Christ, our denominational buildings give glaring witness precisely to our lack of unity in him, and I am not speaking only of denominational sharing. There is no intrinsic reason why a Catholic and Protestant parish could not work out ways to use the same physical facilities. (This might even help to stabilize the curious tendency for Protestant churches to get more ornate at precisely the moment when Catholic churches are getting simpler.)

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And as far as the use of facilities goes, must we not begin to think of making our facilities available to so-called secular groups during the week, and being willing sometimes to use so-called secular facilities on Sundays? (One church of which I know recently pledged $750,000 to build a parish house extension because the Sunday School had had to start using rooms in the next-door junior high, and that somehow just wasn't fitting.) I look for the time when a Christian church and a Jewish Temple will be able to work out arrangements for building and using many of the same facilities, not only as an emblem of the healing of some terrible historical scars, but as a Simple exercise in good economy and logistics-no Sunday traffic problems with that kind of dual usage!

Fourthly, let me note another level of challenge. The churches architects will be building are to be witnesses, among other things, to a gospel that proclaims social justice, buildings in which it will be declared that God is the father of all men, and that race and class have no place within the body of Christ. And yet it is notorious that we permit our buildings to be built with discriminatory clauses in labor contracts, and that our very efforts to create places where all men can worship are constructed under conditions where very frequently not all men can work.

In an era when the churches have finally begun to show some sensitivity to, and involvement in, the struggle for racial justice and equality, that witness is rendered singularly hollow and hypocritical when it becomes apparent that in building after building those same churches condone discriminatory hiring and labor policies. Here is a place for an ending of false witness before the building is ever begun, and a place where an ecumenical meeting of minds could carry incalculable force in promoting social justice, by insisting that all church building contracts have nondiscriminatory clauses built into them. The churches, united to-ether on a point like this, could even insist on on-the-job training for minority groups, and insist that such provisions go into a contract.

An end to false witness is not going to come just by some independent resolves of architects or of churchmen. This kind of resolve must be corporate. Church building committees that don't know how to tell the architect what a church is and ought to be are to be at least as severely indicted as architects who look upon a church building simply as a chance to experiment with another pet

537 - True and False Witness: Architecture and the Church

idea. Church committees that place demands on architects that deny artistic integrity are to be chastised as much as architects who want full freedom of design at the expense of theological integrity. Let us see our day, then, as an opportunity for each to explore more fully the mind of the other, so that through our acts of human collaboration we may create those special areas of space in which we learn that all space is holy.