[nyokodo]

> In other words, to the religious, the use of the building for non-religious purposes is "shrug".

This isn’t accurate except for perhaps certain parts of Protestantism. To Catholics, Orthodox, probably portions of the Church of England etc, ie a majority of Christianity church buildings are holy and specially blessed. They hold the Eucharist in the Tabernacle which these Churches believe is the body and blood of Jesus under the guise of bread which is the most holy thing for them. In order for these buildings to be used for any other purpose all the holy things would need to be removed and the building specifically deconsecrated.

[Barrin92]

Yup I'm gonna second this one. I grew up in Cologne and Christians here generally don't think the Cologne Cathedral [1] (which holds among other things, according to the Church the bones of the three magi) is "just a building" and if you wanted to argue to turn it into a mall next week you'd probably get a pretty strong reaction from members of the church

[1] https://www.wandererscompass.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/...

[williamdclt]

If you wanted to turn the cathedral of cologne into a mall you’d get a pretty strong reaction from _me_, who’s neither religious nor has ever been to Cologne!

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

>if you wanted to argue to turn it into a mall next week you'd probably get a pretty strong reaction from members of the church

Even us atheists should hope that the building would get a little more love and respect than that.

[mock-possum]

Growing up Methodist, we learned it via church camp singalong:

A church is not a building

A church is not a steeple

A church is not a resting place

A church is a people

I am the church

You are the church

We are the church together

All who follow Jesus

All around the world

Yes were the church to-clap!-gether.

I don’t believe in any of it anymore, but it’s still a nice sentiment - the only thing I really miss about Christianity is the community.

[dingnuts]

same -- maybe you should look into the Quakers, they're basically a denomination that is only community and sans doctrine, is my understanding. I only haven't followed this advice for bad reasons

[swat535]

The Church building is only considered Holy when Christ is considered present for Eucharist. Should it be removed along with the Altar, it only becomes a building, to Catholics at least. This is why abandon Churches can be converted to other things, in Montreal there are examples of these buildings.

OP is correct here by saying that the Church is the people. It’s just that the word has two meanings, the church building and the Church of Christ.

It’s also why sometimes you hear Christians say things like “your family is also your Church”

[lo_zamoyski]

According to canon law, a Catholic church must be desacralized (or deconsecrated) in order to be licitly used for other, though not just any, purposes[0].

[0] https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/when-a-church-is-de...

[DiggyJohnson]

In the NT and early history of the [Catholic] church it was explicitly the people and not the building.

[PaulRobinson]

Your interpretation of "people and not the building" is pretty unique to Protestantism in the Christian belief, and arguably the central tenet of Methodism. It is absent in much of the history of Christian (and most other monotheistic) beliefs.

I recommend you look at (as an example), what the Catholic Church did since around the conversion of the Romans through to Vatican II. Even when I was a kid (some decades after Vatican II), attending Catholic school and regularly attending mass, the Catholic Church building was considered an incredibly special place by the congregations.

In my school, the chapel (which held a tabernacle), was once used by some well-meaning but incredibly ill-educated pupils to hold a palm reading booth for a school fete fundraiser. When the more traditional Catholics in the faculty found out, they burst in, soaking the pupils and chapel with holy water and latin prayer (first time used in the school since Vatican II! Showed their colours that day!), claiming that to engage in the occult near a tabernacle was an incredibly offensive thing to do, because the space held a tabernacle, end of.

The whole thing about Protestantism is to remove mystery. Research the early history from Luther through the English Tudors and the King James Bible, all the way through to the Mayflower and the reason why they were fleeing Europe to the New World, and you'll see that big and plain. It doesn't mean that a sense of mystery in terms of rituals and rites held in special designated spaces died and went away though, it just means it's less present than it once was.

For many, many people (billions on Earth today), "holy spaces" remain exactly that: consecrated spaces that are in themselves holy regardless of whether a human congregation is present or not. And this is not limited to Christianity either.

As this was a Methodist Church, I suspect most people who used it would consider it "just a building", albeit one with sentimental memories (weddings, funerals, weekly worship), but sure, it's bricks and mortar and balconies and pews and a broken organ. shrug.

It's just that's actually quite an unusual viewpoint on a global scale, for most denominations.

[apelapan]

Catholics abandon and sell church buildings all the time. Once you've removed a small handful of sacred items and done the de-consecration-ritual, it is "just a building" to them too.

There are vast numbers of repurposed churches in Catholic countries. Just walk the streets in an Italian city.

I'm not familiar with the specifics for catholics, but it is conceptually not too different from how protestants do it.

With the caveat, best repeated in every post under this article, that of course very strong sentimental feelings can be attached to a church building. You could put a religious dimension on the morality of hurting peoples feelings by destroying or changing a beautiful thing I guess. But, it is not the house itself that is holy in a holy house.

[PaulRobinson]

The piece you're missing is de-consecration. A consecrated space is holy whether the people are in it or not, within the Catholic tradition. Yes, you can deconsecrate it, and then it's just a building. However a loaded tabernacle makes it a holy space in the eyes of Catholics even if it's an empty space. It is conceptually very different to Methodism: the entire point of Methodism is to abandon such mysteries.

[apelapan]

I think we agree, because I did mention the de-consecration as a crucial step.

The Lutheran churches where I'm from do a similar thing.

[giraffe_lady]

I'm eastern orthodox so not part of one of the groups you're talking about but we share a lot with catholics so maybe close enough.

The reaction you're talking about with the palm reading seems like it could have mostly been because of the presence of a loaded tabernacle? I mean I doubt they would have been pleased about this without it but lay catholics I know take the tabernacle extremely seriously.

I don't particularly, aesthetically, like to see churches used for secular purposes but if they've been properly desacralized I don't have any strong religious objections.

> "holy spaces" remain exactly that: consecrated spaces that are in themselves holy regardless of whether a human congregation is present or not

This is true but it implies a causality that is backwards I think. Spaces aren't holy because of the consecration, they're holy because of the people that come there to worship together regularly over many years. If they stop doing that the church doesn't immediately "lose its holiness" or whatever but it does change: it becomes a shrine or a relic or maybe just a building.

[PaulRobinson]

> The reaction you're talking about with the palm reading seems like it could have mostly been because of the presence of a loaded tabernacle?

Yes, I think the tabernacle was the crux of the issue here.

> Spaces aren't holy because of the consecration, they're holy because of the people that come there to worship together regularly over many years.

That's a more modern, and dare I say, Methodist view of the church. If a space has a tabernacle in it with the body of Christ in it, within the Catholic tradition, that space is holy and consecrated even when there isn't a human soul in the place, because by definition there is a belief that the soul of Christ is in that space.

You can deconsecrate that space and remove that blessed sacrament and then it's just a building, but in the eyes of most Catholics the space itself has a mystery even in the absence of worshipping congregations.

[giraffe_lady]

Like I said I'm orthodox and have never been much exposed to protestant theology other than it just being sort of in the air in western secular culture.

I think you'd get interesting answers if you polled lay catholics with a question like "which is more holy, a consecrated but never-used church, or a parish recently desacralized after centuries of regular use."

There's definitely one "correct" answer if you asked a bishop or a catholic theologian. But I have noticed that there is often a big difference between lay religious experience and hierarchically controlled official dogma. A poll a few years ago had less than half of american catholics believing in transubstantiation, for example.

[PaulRobinson]

In the spirit of Father Ted (watch it if you've never seen it, it's fantastic), I think we are heading into the reaches of an ecumenical matter... :)

[umanwizard]

Perhaps, but that was 2000 years ago and not necessarily identical to how people feel/believe today.

[cvoss]

You're kind of proving the point. The building is not the real thing, as any sense in which it is holy (which is a word that means set apart for a special purpose) can be readily undone. The church doesn't cease to exist when that happens. It moves. The same way the Tabernacle (the ancient Tabernacle) moved, which happened on a semi-regular basis. The place is less important than who is there.

[mock-possum]

It seems like this is confusing The Church with a church.

Notre Dame Cathedral is a church, but you could burn it to the ground tomorrow and it wouldn’t have hardly any impact at all on the persistence of The Church.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Such is claimed, but I suspect that this is a misleading truth. Christianity is an extremely successful religion, but if it were less popular and Notre Dame was one of only a few church buildings (even, just one of a few with that level of grandeur), then burning it to the ground would indeed have a profound impact on the persistence of The Church. For those religions with a single temple, the destruction of that building is more than merely traumatic, it is catastrophic. Christianity only avoids this by having so very many buildings, many of them as spectacular as Notre Dame.

[ForTheKidz]

Surely if the church was just the people such a ritual of consecration would have fallen by the wayside a long time ago.

Anyway, there are in fact many christians who view churches as sacred in themselves. Good luck painting christianity with any such a wide brush.

[DiggyJohnson]

The inclusion of the word “just” makes this comment not so relevant to the discussion. Nobody is claiming that.

[ForTheKidz]

I'm afraid i'm missing the point of the entire conversation, then. Nobody was claiming church was just a building to begin with either.

[jes5199]

sure but a church building that hasn’t been used in years surely was already deconsecrated