Jesus Has Left the Building

Rebecca Sheridan
Sunday, November 17, 2025
 

Jesus Has Left the Building
    Earlier this year, the vice president of research and planning of the National Council of Churches estimated that as many as 100,000 church buildings (one-quarter of church buildings currently in operation in the United States) will close in the next several years.  Reasons for this include dramatic decrease in average worship attendance especially for people younger than 21 (from 70% a generation ago to now just 40% according to a 2021 Gallup Poll), the rising costs of operating a building including utilities, insurance, and property maintenance, and the ability for people to drive more easily and worship online where they want to.  For many reasons, the number of churches needed now doesn’t fit the number of churches that exist right now. (https://www.cnu.org/publicsquare/2024/08/13/tsunami-church-closings-poses-crisis-and-opportunity#:~:text=Finally%2C%20Covid%2D19%20threw%20its,quarter%20of%20those%20in%20operation. Accessed 12 November 2024).  
This is true also for the seminary I attended – the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago sold its buildings last year and moved to the newly renovated fourth floor of the Catholic Theological Union down the street.  Fewer seminary students are enrolled from when Rich and I attended there 15 years ago, and the property upkeep was cost-prohibitive.  This made total sense, logically, but it’s still emotionally difficult when a sacred building closes; Rich and I were married at the chapel that no longer exists on a seminary campus that no longer exists.  We can’t take our kids to visit the place where we met and were married.  When it’s not our church, it’s easy to say, “Ah, that makes sense, I see why they closed or sold that building.”  But church buildings are still tools for us to do ministry and worship the Lord.  There are so many emotions and memories held in this particular space.  Jesus’ reminder that the church is not a building but the people is a difficult one for us to hear, sometimes.
    Has anyone been to the temple mount in Jerusalem?  If you have, or even just Google pictures of it, it is so impressive.  Historians still can’t quite figure out how people built the temple – the individual stones themselves are incredibly large it would be an architectural/engineering feat even today.  Jesus foretells the second destruction of the temple in 70 AD in our gospel from Mark today.  Faithful Jews during Jesus’ time understood the temple to be the holiest place to worship God.  The temple was a portal between heaven and earth, and indeed, it was a beautiful, impressive structure that could fit over 200,000 worshippers.  We don’t like to think about this particular church building being sold or destroyed; we can only imagine how horrible it would have been for Jesus’ first followers to hear that the temple would be gone. Then, forty years or so later, for the people of Jerusalem both Jews and Christians alike to actually experience the temple being destroyed by the Romans had to be devastating. So what is Jesus trying to say here?
    Jesus’ teaching today is a difficult but good reminder that we worship God, not the building.  Buildings are temporary, our faith is eternal.  Jesus asks us to think about what’s in our hearts, not just where we go for outward appearances.  God’s eternal kingdom is more precious than even the buildings we create to encourage and inspire worship of God.  WE are more precious to Christ than the most valuable, holiest of buildings.  Those of us who live in places where there are four seasons know that we still need a building to gather to do ministry – to worship, have Bible study, Sunday School, fellowship activities and so on especially when it is too hot, too cold, or raining to be comfortable outside!  But the church is not the building, the church is the people.
    In fact, the church is the body of Christ!  This is the image our reading from Hebrews gives us today: the temple curtain is Christ’s flesh, the sanctuary is the new and living way of Jesus, Christ presides as high priest over this spiritual house of God which is us, the people of faith, saved by God’s grace, connected by Christ’s death and resurrection.  Today our scriptures remind us that the primary purpose of the church is to be the body of Christ in the world, not just to come to a beautiful building for one hour a week to worship.  Gathering together to worship as a community of faith IS a part of what it means to be the church.  Then we are sent back out into the world to continue to live like Christ in our communities; that’s the other half of the equation.  
    The coming of Christ opened up the ability of ordinary people to worship and connect to God in all kinds of new ways.  You no longer needed to go to the temple and have the high priest make sacrifices on your behalf.  Christ connects us with God directly – we can worship God wherever, whenever.  However, as we found during COVID, it’s hard to worship God by yourself all the time.  So our author of Hebrews encourages us to gather regularly in Christian community: “let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another…”. There are no 2000 year-old church buildings.  But I do know, thanks be to God, that the church is 2000+ years old.  From the time of Christ’s death and resurrection, Christians have been gathering together week after week after week to worship the Lord, to be strengthened by Baptism and Holy Communion, to confess sins and receive forgiveness, to share the peace of Christ with one another and pray for one another and the world, and then to go back out to serve and love the neighbor.  That’s 104,000 Sundays, roughly, that the church has been gathering and strengthening one another to make disciples who serve Christ!
    The church is you, and you are the body of Christ, in other words.  We use our beautiful building to offer childcare and faith formation for 18 month-olds to preschoolers during the week with our Nursery School classrooms.  Boy Scouts meet downstairs to plan and serve, music groups rehearse and perform, we eat a lot of good food here and collect food to go back out to feed the hungry.  Not just on Sundays this building is filled with praise of the Lord!  The challenge is for us to continue to serve and live like who we say we are, the body of Christ, beyond the building, beyond Sunday morning.  Even after this building is gone, we hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering that the church, the body of Christ, still lives.  “For he who has promised is faithful.”  Thanks be to God!  Amen.