A doorway to God

Today is the second anniversary of the completion of Light of the Lakes UMC. We celebrated this event last Sunday in church. As part of the sermon I used different images of churches I had photographed in France. The three churches I showed were Sacre Couer, Notre Dame, and Sainte Chapelle. I grew up going to Hamline UMC, which while smaller, was built (in the 1920's) in a similar style to the great cathedrals of Europe. Baxter, as a newer, younger, growing community has few examples of older styles of churches, and instead has churches built along much more modern lines. what is perhaps most striking to me is the effect of these different worship spaces. From what I understand, a lot of modern churches are built to make people feel comfortable and at open. Theater style seating and corporate style atriums remind people of other buildings and places they are comfortable going. The cathedrals of hundreds of years ago were built along very different lines. Rather than wanting to make people feel at home, they were meant to convey the majesty of God, to transport one's soul and spirit towards Heaven, to reveal a bit of the Divine to humanity. Do our churches today help give us a sense of the divine? Or do our churches instead become something mundane? In an effort to make people comfortable and at home (important things to do) do we loss something that makes church exceptional, special, something more. I would b e the last person to advocate overly for the sacredness of church. I think that God can, and is experienced all around us. The church is not the place where God lives, nor is it the sole place to experience God, but it must be a place to experience God. I think the challenge today is to make sure that our places of worship help bring a sense of the divine to our everyday lives and help transport people, at least for a moment out of our everyday lives into something extraordinary, into a place of worship.