Tim Suffield.com

I went to a wedding yesterday, but that isn’t what I want to talk about. The service was in a traditional looking Anglican church building - stained glass, soaring ceilings, the works.

Now, this isn’t the sort of place that churches in our sort of streams tend to meet in, but it does have some benefits. Beyond the great acoustics, buildings of that style show people something about God. The soaring edifices, the beautiful architecture, they demonstrate that our God is holy. The otherness, the grandeur, show us that we cannot step into God’s presence lightly.

Having churches that look like that is a deliberate theological act specifically designed to teach people truth about God’s holiness. It is in part a hang-over from Catholicism, but mainly is the legacy of the English Arminianism of late 1500s and of the later Arminianism of Archbishop Laud in the 1630s and 40s. Despite disagreeing with most of their theology, their concern with the ‘beauty of holiness’ led to specific reforms in the ways churches looked in an attempt to communicate the holiness of God. Sadly though, their theological concern with God’s holiness led to an almost complete disregard for God’s grace.

Obviously, being a church like that presents a problem of how you present the outrageous grace of God in a way that people believe they have a right to be in that place, that people begin to understand that they can call the very presence of the fearsome God who is, ‘home’.

This isn’t a problem that my sort of church has. However, perhaps we have an inverse problem. If we are in a church that effectively teaches the radical, paradigm-shattering grace of God, then how do we effectively communicate the vastness and mind-bending magnitude of the glory of majestic Yahweh? If our church demonstrates clearly that we can enter into God’s presence freely and without shame, which we can, then how do we demonstrate to people quite how miraculous this is?

In a church that understands the lavish grace of God, how do we teach God’s holiness?

Answers on a postcard.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 22nd, 2007 at 5:12 pm and is filed under Reflections. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.