Bishop Forsyth Writes - August 2006

BISHOP WRITES
with BISHOP ROB FORSYTH

It’s only a building, but…’

There’s a lot going on about buildings in the South Sydney Region at the moment. A terrible fire at one church, a million dollar building project in another, and in a another parish (meeting in an inadequate hall) a long wait for the aircraft noise abatement people to rebuild the church.

So what’s a building anyway? Just a building? Well, no actually.

I was struck with what Ian Powell of St Barnabas’, Broadway said last month on ABC radio. He noted that Barneys’ people did not dismiss their ruined church in a cavalier way with, ‘Oh, it’s only a building’. Instead they would say “It’s only a building, but…”. Why the ‘but’?

Because, as Ian put it, ‘it’s not only a building, it’s a building where people got married, and people met God. I don’t think we’ve actually, in my little part of the Christian world, … [become] very competent at speaking about how place has some significance’.

Maybe it is well we are not very competent in speaking about the significance of our places, lest we make too much of them. After all, churches can meet anywhere. Space does not make the church. The Lord Jesus Christ present through his word and Spirit among his gathered people is what makes a church.

And yet there are times to notice the special place that particular places can have. As one letter writer to The Sydney Morning Herald taking issue with the definition of his old church as no more than a ‘beautiful rain shelter’ wrote, ‘As a student and church worker at Barneys 30 years ago, I experienced things, in fellowship with hundreds of others, that were life-transforming and elevating.  Who is not to say there is no such thing as sacred space?’

Without going that far, I think we can say there is such a thing as consecrated space, that is, space set apart or consecrated for a particular ‘holy’ purpose. Ironically, the church of St Barnabas’ was not officially consecrated as Anglican churches often are. Many years ago, when an archbishop wrote to the churchwardens wondering when this lack could be remedied, apparently one of the more feisty members replied, “We don’t need a bishop to consecrate this building. It’s been consecrated already by the preaching of God’s word and the meeting of his people.” Exactly. 

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