I’ve been hearing a lot about the book I’m currently reading: Pagan Christianity, and I have mixed feelings about it so far. I had mixed feelings before I ever started reading it. After the reviews I had read, I expected a light-weight treatment of the subject, sprinkled with unreasonable condemnation and with a touch of bitterness toward the “Institutional Church” or IC, as “insiders” refer to it. Having now read around half the book, I’d have to say that it is a fairly light-weight work sprinkled with maybe-not-so-unreasonable condemnation and certainly with a touch of bitterness toward the IC.

By light-weight, I don’t mean to impugn the authors’ research or writing style or anything else. I only mean it’s a popularly accessible book–like the New Century Version of the Bible. It’s not heavy intellectual stuff, which is nice for those of us who haven’t spent a lot of time studying early church history. The sentence structure makes for easy reading. Hey, not every writer has to be Milton, right? Just because people who don’t read a lot of heavy cerebral stuff can understand it doesn’t make it bad. I’m making a big deal of this because I’ve read criticisms on this front and I think they’re unjustified. Not everything has to be written on a college level.

I’ll give an overall assessment of this book once I’ve read it all, but for now I’ll talk about the forward, etc., and chapters one and two. All the pre-book stuff can be skipped without compromising your understanding of the book. I read most of it and I’m pretty sure you’re not going to find anything new–I didn’t. The first chapter starts on page one, but all the intro stuff ends on page xxxiii, so there’s a lot of it.

Chapter one starts with an unfortunate story about a “typical” family going to church. It’s silly, but don’t let it put you off. The book does get better. This chapter serves as a “guide” to the book and is quite short. Probably worth reading, but again, you could manage without it if you’re pinched for time.

Chapter two deals with the church building and has a lot of fascinating history of how come church buildings look like they do. The authors make a big deal out of explaining that the church building is not the church. The church (which I will do in bold from here on out, to keep things clearer) is the people–followers of Christ–who form His body. I learned this as a young child, and I’m 49, so it isn’t revolutionary knowledge. We English speakers are used to words with more than one meaning, as were Latins and Greeks and I’m sure pretty much every other language out there. We call the church building “church”, which it is not, but we presumably know that the church has nothing to do with the brick and mortar. I don’t think this is a real problem, but words do have meaning. Maybe the authors are right.

I know, though, that when I say “I’m headed to church”, I mean several things. First, I’m going to a specific location–I may say this even if I expect no one but myself to be there, such as if I’m working on a project. Usually, I also mean that I’m going to some sort of church service or prayer meeting. I’m going to be with the church at the church and we’re going to have church (meaning a church function of some sort).

Now if I were going to meet with a group of believers at the park for a picnic, even though we are, collectively, the body of Christ, I admit I probably wouldn’t say, “I’m going to church” unless we planned to do something overtly spiritual like worship or do a Bible study or have a baptismal service, etc.

According to the authors, Christian churches didn’t own meeting halls (except for private homes owned by members) until Constantine became the first “Christian” Caesar. Christians did own real property and in many cases persecution would not have prevented them from having a dedicated meeting house, but they simply didn’t choose to do this. While I’m reading this, I’m thinking: “And your point is . . . ? What about this makes it wrong to own a church building to house the church when we’re having church?” Well, the authors do get to this.

Before I go into the reasons the meeting place is considered important, let me digress to my personal story. I grew up in the United Methodist Church. My parents were charter members of a church plant in Winter Haven, FL. We were always doing stuff together. We met in the high school for a long time, but people spent a lot of time our house. My dad was a builder, so we always had nice houses, and my mom was/is the consumate hostess. I didn’t realize until I was nearly through this chapter why that church worked the way it did. It was a wonderful church and a big part of the reason was that God used my mom’s hospitality to make it so. Everyone belonged. Everyone knew everyone else and felt (and was) welcome in the body. I don’t remember getting anything special out of the church services, and I have no particular fondness or distaste for the church building, but that wasn’t really where church happened most of the time (Well, okay, it did happen there a lot, but I have to maintain that the reason it did was that it started at home–our home.) We didn’t have “religious” stuff going on at our home most of the time. It was all social–people getting to know and love one another.  That’s what happened all around me, and that’s what made St. John’s the church it was. That’s the church I’ve been searching for and never finding ever since. I came close in a little church in Custer, SD, which met in the pastor’s home. It’s a good church, but it lost a lot of its appeal when we moved to a “real” church building. Why? I begin to understand.

As long as we were meeting in our pastor’s home, we were very informal. Though we had the traditional order of service–music, prayer, sermon, prayer, offering, music–or some variation thereof, we felt free to interrupt the pastor with a question or comment. In the interludes, we might have a prayer request or members of the congregation might offer prayer or (as it was a charasmatic church) a message in tongues with an interpretation or a prophecy (not future prediction, but rather exhortation), etc. As a member of the worship team, I was also free to give any exhortation related to a song I might think appropriate as well as insert an extra song or change a song if we felt we should. So there was a lot of participation. This gradually changed when we bought a building from a dying church in town and merged with them. I think the authors are right. I think the architecture did it.

I’m writing this in blue so you’ll know I’ve added it in. Rereading this morning, I realize I assumed that my readers understood what it was about the typical church architecture stifles participation by the church in the church service. Sitting in an audience, looking at the back of a couple of rows of heads, with a raised platform at the front of the room and people up there talking or singing to you, just shouts at you that this is a performance. You may participate by singing along, or even giving a testimony if someone from the platform invites you, but the guys up on the stage are clearly “in charge” and you’re expected to watch quietly.

I won’t go into basilicas or cathedrals or other formal type church buildings. The authors give quite a good summary of these and it’s worth reading. The point is that these structures all tended (whether or not that was the intent) to foster a passive, attentive audience watching orators, singers, and maybe performers on stage. People were not permitted, nor would they have been inclined, to interrupt or carry on as we did in my Custer church. I’ve been wondering why we have so few people participating in volunteer work–ministry–in my current (soon to be former) church and now I think I may understand that a little better. We’ve all been inadvertently trained by our own architecture to sit quietly, listen, sing along with the hymns or contemporary music, maybe shake a few hands and murmer an unheard comment or welcome when we’re told to, and leave when the service is over. This is what “having church” entails. It doesn’t include sharing life together as in my childhood church, or sharing during the meeting as in my Custer church. It means come in, sing, sit down and listen, give an offering, follow the announcements, and go out to dinner (but not typically with other church members.)

The authors have a few other things to say about the church building, some of which I think no longer apply to most churches, some which do, but the chilling effect our set-up has on body relationships and body participation struck me as the most important. So, is this book worth reading? I think it is. I’m still reading it with caution and I still expect to eventually run across heresy (I’ve seen hints of it here and there in house church/organic church sites), but I can’t disagree with anything major in Pagan Christianity as of yet. I suspect this book will be, not only okay, but disturbingly on-the-mark. I’ll let you know my thoughts as I go along. By the by, lots of people do have opinions on this book, and I’d love to hear yours. (But only if you’ve read it, or at least read the part you’re commenting on). What do you think of the whole architecture (or form dictates function) idea? How do you propose it should be fixed (if it needs fixing) and if not, why not?

God Bless,

Cindy