Making a Local Church Sacred

November 20, 2007

photo used under Creative Commons License, by Flickr user Richard Winchell

One of the interesting papers on my panel at AAR was given by Katie Day of the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. Her paper was entitled "The Construction of Sacred Space in the Urban Ecology". Her work focuses on churches that lie along Germantown Lane in Philadelphia—a historic road with some very old churches, but which is now urbanized. How do church structures become sacred space?

The story goes something like this: a congregation moves into a new structure and reshapes it according to their needs. The members of the congregation pour in time and money to get this church going. It becomes the site for services and worship. At the end of this process the building has become sacred and even people in the community come to see it as a set-apart zone. Thus we arrive at sacred space.

One major problem with this reconstruction is the fact that a Rotary or Lions club would go through exactly the same process. They would build or refurbish an existing building, put a lot of effort into it, and finally have a building of which they were proud. Yet this is not a "sacred" site, right? It is just "significant". And as for the respect given to the church by outsiders, that is simply a measure of respect for its cause. A secular Civil Rights Society would likely get the same level of respect, while a white supremacist oriented church would not get that respect. So we are not talking about anything that is specifically religious; we are talking about a human process of space construction that is tapped into by religious groups.

The first task is to throw out the term "sacred". It is a muddying word that implies the existence of some "secular" landscape out there. Nothing can be understood from that position. What we have is an undifferentiated landscape, some of which is taken up by groups and invested with a level of symbolic significance. For the people that invest money and time in a building, and then once a week attend some form of communal worship, a group identity forms. That identity is then transferred to the building itself: the building becomes the outward manifestation (symbol) of a particular identity commitment. That process as I have described it requires no belief in God.. or religious stance of any kind. It is a process that the Rotary and Elks clubs, veterans associations and AA groups, have in common.