Sermon: The church is/has a building

SERMON

FROM RIVERSIDE

THE CHURCH IS/HAS A BUILDING

Dr. Ernest T. Campbell

October 19, 1969

THE CHURCH IS/HAS A BUILDING

I had a friend in the ministry who bridled at the
use of the word "Reverend" before a clergyman's name.
He wasted no opportunity to straighten the world out
on the fact that the word "reverend" was an adjective,
not a title. Quite correctly, he pointed out that to
speak of a minister as Reverend Smith was as wrong as
referring to a judge as Honorable Jones. Did his cam-
paign to abolish the inevitable accomplish anything?
Apparently not. In fact, some of his brethren in the
ministry, myself included, used to add to his woes and
deepen the lostness of his cause by writing him letters
that bore the salutation in caps, "DEAR REVEREND."

Today I may be off on an equally impossible rescue
operation. The word I want to salvage is the word
"church." Whether you misuse the word Reverend or not
is relatively unimportant, except to grammerians or
sensitive preachers. But how you use the word "church"
has far reaching implications for the shape and direc-
tion of your life .

■* * •*

Join me in sensing the problem by asking yourself
whether it is more accurate to say "The church is a
building," or "The church has a building." In common
speech the assumption prevails that the church is a
building. Why else would we ask a neighbor "Will you
come to church with me today?" Why else would we turn
to a colleague at work on Thursday morning and say
"We had a good meeting at the church last night." Or
why would a lawyer in San Francisco turn to his part-
ner and say "When you go east and stop in New York be
sure to visit The Riverside Church."

But in the Biblical and purer sense the church is
not a building. The church is people who only inci-
dentally have a building. Church is not something you
go to: Church is something you are. It is not an

edifice but a fellowship . Its durability is not in the
strength of its stone but in the commitment of its mem-
bers.

The church is not a building, the church has a
building. Any cause, to function in our world, needs
place and location. It is a false dualism that would
suggest that because the church's primary concern is
with the kingdom of God it can exist in spiritual form
alone .

It is not without significance that the Hebrews
had first a tabernacle in the wilderness and in the
Promised Land a temple. Jesus pronounced judgment on
the temple of his day not because the building as such
was wrong but because the temple had betrayed its pur-
pose and been unfaithful to its vision.

The church is people who have a building. The
people are primary. The building is secondary. But
there is hardly a congregation of Christian people
anywhere who do not have to fight continuously to
subordinate the building in which they meet to the
purpose for which they exist.

It would be hard to imagine a place where greater
vigilance against the equation "The church is the build-
ing, " is more needed than here at Riverside. The least
important part of a church's life is the building where
it gathers; but the more beautiful and stately the build-
ing, the stronger the likelihood that this will be for-
gotten.

The magnitude and magnificance of this building
grows on me with every passing day. There is no reason
why museums, office buildings and concert halls should
be architecturally compelling while churches forfeit
beauty in the service of the good and the true . I re-
joice in a church whose graceful form adorns the skyline
of the city. A church that is worthy of a stop on the

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Gray Line Tour. A church that can make the heart pound
faster and the pulse race. If this church cannot turn
you on, my friend, then you don't have any switches I

Nor is its beauty idle. Its height is appropri-
ate to majesty. Its darkness appropriate to mystery.
Its bells appropriate to joy* And its music appropri-
ate to praise. What it cost is more than off- set by
what it has inspired men to be and do, "How amiable
are thy tabernacles, 0 Lord of hosts I My soul longeth,
yea, even fainteth for the courts of the Lord* My
heart and my flesh crieth out for the living God/'

(Ps 84:12)

But strangely enough this building which is our
joy is at the same time our most formidable barrier to
mission. How so? For one thing it can easily draw in-
to membership people who are in love with stone, rather
than in love with Jesus Christ. Just as a beautiful
lady is never quite sure whether she is loved for her
beauty or for herself, so a beautiful church is never
sure whether people are drawn to her loveliness or to
her Christ. The rock on which the church is built,
and every branch of the church including this, has
nothing at all to do with physical symmetry and form«
We know what the rock iso Jesus turned to his dis-
ciples and asked "Who do you say that I am?" Peter
stepped forward and answered "Thou art the Christ the
son of the living God." Jesus responded to that af-
firmation, "Thou art Peter, and upon this rock" (the
rock of a man confessing his faith in the living Christ,
"upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates
of hell will not prevail against it«" (Mat 16:18) The
most valuable asset of this or any other congregation
in the Christian world is the number of people on its
rolls who have pledged their "yes" to Christ <,

But this building in which we gather today is also
a barrier to mission in that it tends to draw people in
rather than send them out. Many church buildings in
this country simply and frankly do not say "come/'
They are poorly designed, cheaply built, uncomfortable,

uninviting. All across the nation there are people who
go to such church buildings only out of a strong sense
of duty. They go as late as they can and leave as
early as they can because the buildings do not say
"come."

Not so this church. For many of us; and let us
not blush to declare it, this building is the most
beautiful thing in our lives - materially speaking. It
is the cleanest, safest, most attractive building that
we frequent regularly. There are men and women and
boys and girls by the hundreds who come to this build-
ing week after week from roachy, cramped, poorly ven-
tilated, undersized apartments. This building provides
for them what might be called a ministry of place.

One of the most moving pieces of writing that
Ernest Hemmingway ever gave us is his short story A
Clean Well-Lighted Place . Two waiters in the late
hours of the night talk with each other about why the
cafe stays open so long. One waiter is impatient. He
wants to close up and go home. The other looks at a
lonely deaf man enjoying a drink on the veranda and
feels compassionate, "Each night" he says, "I'm re-
luctant to close up because there may be someone who
needs the cafe." "Hombre," says his partner, "there
are bodegas open all night long." The first waiter
replies "You do not understand. This is a clean and
pleasant cafe. It is well lighted. The light is very
good and also, now, there are shadows of the leaves." 1
As one reads on one senses that the sympathetic waiter
wants the cafe open long into the night not only for
the sake of the deaf man, but for himself as well.

That's just it, we come to this building and when
we come we want to stay. When we go we want to return.
We are handicapped in that coming to this clean well-
lighted place we do not often see or feel the city
round about us. It is possible to commute to this
church on a Sunday morning from a suburb, ride down
clean, well-traveled roads, slide into a parking place
in a well-kept garage, come upstairs on antiseptically

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pure elevators and, never see the city at all. The

first word of the gospel is "Come.," But the second

word is "Go." And that's the word we do not hear too
well, much less obey.

Finally, may I suggest that this building in which
we rejoice is a harrier to our sense of mission because
it tends to blunt the urgency of our need to give. The
most unbelieved words in any church bulletin in America,
bar none, are these' "The services of worship and the
work of this church are dependent upon the contribu-
tions of its members and visitors/' Even people within
the church don't believe it. It's bad enough when
friends on the outside don't understand « Never does a
week go by that we don't get two or three requests for
financial add from all sorts of causes in the city and
beyond. The assumption seems to be that The Riverside
Church has a bottomless treasury and unlimited funds.
At first I was flattered by such letter s, but now I'm
getting nervous about them. Does Riverside have un-
limited money? Apparently so, but actually no.

We who are members have difficulty believing this.
The building we have "inherited" blinds us to authentic
budgetary needs. I saw a clever ad in a paper in Colum-
bia^ South Carolina this summer, placed by the local
bus company. It said "Ride a $30 ,,000 bus for 20 cents.'
Which being translated and applied to our situation
means "Come worship in a multi-million dollar plant for
a dollar a week."

One of our members said it for me when he said,
"Riverside Churchy in a sense , is stone poor. " The
building and its upkeep are safeguarded through endow <=
ment funds. The Trustees of this church deserve credit
for keeping those funds adequate despite the inroads
of inflation. Bat the staff and program of this church
are dependent on what we give^and this is the way it
ought to be. As the old saying has it, "Endowed cats
catch no mice." If all we can do is gather in the lux-
ury and finery of this place without making an adequate
contribution to the on-going mission of the Christian

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church, then we would deserve no better fate than to
see it all close down I

There are many churches in this land, in fact most,
for whom the current expense budget is a matter of life
and death. "Where will we get the money to pay for the
heat and the light and the insurance?" Providentially,
in this congregation we are not beset by these concerns.
Yet, our freedom from such worries has not sufficiently
motivated us to support the program life and out-reach
of this congregation as we ought. Building wealth, my
friends, does not and will not carry over into program
and staff expense.

* ■* *

We have here, bless God, a plant that is second to
none and open to all. But the plant is not the church.
The church is people, people who know the Christ and
yearn to make Him known. What we need now are men to
match our building - vision, to match the height of our
tower; beauty, to match the flowing gothic lines; har-
mony of communion, to match the anthems of our peerless
choristers. Would that we were as true as the bells
that ring in the Carillon, as straight as the aisles of
the nave, as clean as the floors on which we walk, as
attractive as the stained glass windows. Would that we
could be to our city, to our country, and to our world
in flesh and blood and spirit - all that this building
means in stone .

It is wrong to say "the church is a building."
It is right to say "the church has a building." Peter,
himself the rock on which the church is founded, said
to his fellow believers, "And like living stones be your-
selves built into a spiritual house." (i Peter 2:5a)

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CLOSING PRAYER

Lord,, for every impulse to serve
generated in this place ,

for every friendship formed,,
for every stiffening of the will
for worthy ends^,
we bless Thy name .

Nag us continuously about our
priorities - until what
matters most to Thee
matters most to us.

Through Jesus Christ Our Lord

Amen,

FOOTNOTES:

1. Hemingway,, Ernest^ A Clean Well-Lighted Place ^
p. 32, Scribner, 1927

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