I am an architect. Any skill that I have is a direct gift from God. So, I help make places because that is what God gave me to do. So it is not surprising that I do a great deal of pro bono work for spiritually focused organizations who are in need of advice about the places they use to fulfill their mission. Having been immersed in helping make spiritually-focused places for forty years, two realities collide.

After sharing my own particular gifts for forty years, my manic mission is to make beauty and help those who need a place to live their values. Creating architecture is hardwired in me. In that way, I feel that St. Peter is a kindred spirit. At the Transfiguration of Jesus, the extreme miracle of God on earth being realized, Peter was compelled to jump into the infinite ecstasy of the moment with the ham-handed enthusiasm we all share: “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here. Let us make here three tabernacles; one for you, and one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” (Mk 9:5)

God’s response to Peter’s (and my) leap of human devotion: “This is my beloved Son. Listen to him.”

In response to Peter’s need to jump in and build a response to the unknowable, God offers the divine equivalent of “I’m good.” To a hammer every solution is a nail and to an architect (and St. Peter) when in doubt, make something. My own unthinking devotion to giving what I have been given is as human for me as it was for Peter, and everyone else. So it is not surprising that I do a great deal of pro bono work for spiritually focused organizations who are in need of advice about the places they use to fulfill their mission.

But that devotion has a feedback loop. When I leap into a need, I am immediately immersed in what an organization needs, and its particular motivations. In the second half of the 20^th century, America was replete with many St. Peter’s inventing all those buildings that are now being abandoned, soon repurposed. Now everything is changing. One of those changes is that there is an extraordinary shift in how Americans are living religion. So when I leap into the need of faith-based places, I can see how those changes are playing out.  The latest Pew Report survey says:

Depending on whether religious switching continues at recent rates, speeds up or stops entirely, the projections show Christians of all ages shrinking from 64% to between a little more than half (54%) and just above one-third (35%) of all Americans by 2070. Over that same period, “nones” would rise from the current 30% to somewhere between 34% and 52% of the U.S. population.

In the 20^th century I would be asked to expand a place of worship — either a sanctuary or a parish hall. During that time, I often feel like the eager St. Peter, leaping at every opportunity to work. But the last twenty years has seen the whole world shift — and religion, and so how architects project faith in how we build to reflect this 21st century reality. The cultural break is being seen across all the existing building types that are now obsolete. Shopping malls are becoming housing, multiplex movie theaters are being abandoned, and who knows what Post Offices will become. In the northeast and west coast places of worship are being abandoned.

It is not the time to build a way out of the unknowable.

Before this era of information explosion, our answer to unavoidable fear was ritualized faith – often in the rituals we created for ourselves. Places of worship were set first and foremost to reflect the architectural accommodation of traditional services, the patterns of worshipping that were embracing the beauty of ritual. In that world, my inner St. Peter could build a way to answer doubt with construction. But no rituals I know of can intercede when every disease loses its mystery and offers only a grim prognosis. No design can capture the hope from the clutches of the “Imagine There Is No Heaven” ennui that deadens our hope beyond ourselves. Architecture springs from us, it does not define us or enact our hopes.

America is leaving the comfort of 20th Century religion-based culture for a life that lives on the internet — where sharing consumes lives, but does not offer hope beyond that sharing. If life is lived on our screens, controlled by the cold data of the algorithm, then being with other humans and sharing life together has no architectural expression. The church building is empty. Humanity is walking away from the rituals we created, and the churches we built.

Buildings may be empty, but the humans are still fully full of hope. That same Pew Survey says:

Many religious ‘nones’ partake in traditional religious practices despite their lack of religious identity, including a solid majority who believe in some kind of higher power or spiritual force.

The opposite of ritual is openness. It is a time when understanding that the radical shift in where our culture is going requires listening to the world and, inevitably, the God to be found within it. For more and more of us connections now happen more in shared values than are found in choreographed traditions — so I listen to those ways of connecting, and how the built world can get out of the way of that connection.

We are opening up worship spaces. We are creating flexibility in the ways those spaces can be used. Open welcome to everyone is more important than the rituals we are devoted to, so effortless access and use is undoing traditional complexities.

As the reality of religion in our lives is changing, I am now called to visit gatherings in the husks of pre-21st century buildings that offer new wine in old vessels. The joy of connection is real, and so is the hope in faith – but I think that we are losing the basis of ritual we have called religion faith’s architecture. In listening to those gatherings, I find that the dissatisfaction of the moment offers a path to connection in the future. Architects desperately want to lead, but we always follow.

In following, I have to listen. So, to me, listening is God’s Work. St. Peter, who shot first and aimed second, ultimately listened, and heard Jesus, and became His Rock. That is my prayer.

COMMENTS

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One response to “Doing God’s Work”

1. Linkathon! – Phoenix Preacher says:

   11/15/2023 at 9:46 pm

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