The Shadow-gloom and Weight of the Sacred

I don't like church auditoriums. Part of my dislike for church auditoriums is pragmatic: they have a very limited usefulness (and that usefulness is almost always monologue). On a functional level that really bothers me. This room is the focal point of any church building and its designed purpose is to elevate one person and make everyone else watch and listen. It's a big investment for a room with so little function. But this isn't my biggest problem with church auditoriums.

My problem with church auditoriums his the way they limit our imagination as Christians. I don't like that their design facilitates the elevation of one person (the speaker) over others (the listeners), but there have been plenty of good preachers, plenty of times I liked the sermons. Even looked forward to hearing them at times--just a few times. In my experience, that's the most you can hope for in a church auditorium. A good speaker.

Our places of worship don't facilitate the Christian imagination. They don't facilitate excitement. They limit our ideas of what God can do in His creation. We file done the aisles. We sit, always looking towards the pulpit.

What if we had auditoriums that had possibility? Maybe a room that could facilitate dialogue? A room that could facilitate practices of communal encouragement.

When we were in Vienna, we often met in living rooms for a time of worship. Often, it was a very similar experience to the church auditorium, but that was our fallacy, unintentional though it was. We were trying to shove auditorium worship practices into living rooms because auditorium church is what we knew. There were other times, though, when we really adapted to the setting. I think that, had we stayed in Vienna, our imaginations would have began to more regularly take the shape of the possibilities surrounding us, presented to us by the space in which we we worshipped. Our worship in the living room had possibilities that don't exist in an auditorium. It was more loose. It wasn't freeform, but we made room for unscripted fellowship, celebration and, hopefully, imagination.