Toward a Theology of Corporate Worship Space

Not with grief, for that would be unprofitable for you. That is one of the verses that we use at Cornerstone as to why we believe in church membership. It's important to us to know that that of your commitment level to our church here. we also, Only allow our members to have to fully use all of their gifts to serve in our body.

and it also is a way for the members to be accountable, have an accountability knowing that if you live in sin, continue in sin, that you'll be confronted about that, and then eventually if you continue to stay in that sin, that you'll be brought before the church. So it gives you an accountability in your life to set yourself underneath the board of elders here. And it also allows others to know of your commitment level to our local body, and allows that through membership. So we have several members this morning, new members that I'd like to invite up here.

Please do not applaud until after I've read all the names, Daniel and Cynthia Knowles. So, you're not. Daniel and Cindy Peterson? So, we have two Daniel and Cindy's that are joining us with our other Daniel and Cindy.

Eddie Chow? You guys didn't know Eddie's middle name was Daniel and Cindy. Amanda Davis. Jeffrey Suo.

Grace Lee And Sarah Lassing. OK, now you can give them, And I'm going to read off a public statement of membership to the new members at the end of this. If you will agree to do these things, say I will. Will you seek to experience the gospel in all of its fullness through the disciplines of Bible study, prayer, fellowship, humility, and giving?

And will you seek to worship the Lord in community with others in this body, with a heart made clean by the blood of Jesus? And will you make it your ambition to be an edifier of the body? And will you allow your brothers and sisters in this local church to minister edification to you? And will you take seriously your relationships with others in the body, doing everything in your power to preserve the unity of the body and love?

And will you make it your ambition to share the gospel of Christ with the lost so that they also might experience the blessings of salvation? And will you consistently contribute as a good steward of God's blessings, such time, talent, and money in the measure that God prospers you so that your so that our local and worldwide ministry of spreading the gospel may continue. If you will do these things, will you say I will? And to the congregation, will you, with the aid of the Holy Spirit, seek to love, encourage, teach, admonish, comfort, and exhort all of our new members here this morning with a genuine desire to see them grow in the knowledge of Christ and His word.

If you will do these things on their behalf, will you say, I will. OK. All right, let's pray together. Our Father, we give you thanks for this morning that you've given us to be together.

What a joy it is to be among God's people and fellowship together. We thank you for these new members and their commitment to our local body. First of all, for their commitment to you, but then their commitment to our local body here. I just pray that you would use them.

In their, with their gifts that you have given them, that they would, they would find ministries, where their hands and their minds, can be useful to you, but that you would use them in our local body. Thank you for their commitment and ask that you'd bless them in Jesus' name. Amen. Thanks and thanks to everyone that, Has joined, I believe we'd like to have the new members assemble on the grass area out here after the second service so everybody can come greet them.

And give them the right hand of fellowship. Well, it's my privilege this morning to open God's word. And maybe preaching a rather unusual sermon this morning, maybe one of the strangest messages you've ever heard. Definitely one of the strangest messages I've ever preached.

The title of the message is Toward a theology of Corporate Worship Space. Co, Back in 1994, Cornerstone Fellowship Bible Church made a really incredible decision. We moved from the YWCA over off Magnolia Adams to this location. The Lord led us to move over here for a variety of purposes, but he made it very clear that this was his will, for the life of our church.

And we are currently, as a body, In a period of our life as a body where we're trying to figure out what is God's will for us as far as our corporate worship space. Does God want us to stay here? Does he want us to continue to venture here with our brothers from the EFC and expand this campus, or does he want us to move and buy property? Does he want us to lease property?

there's a lot of questions that we're trying to answer right now. And so one of the assignments that was given to me, Pastor Milton asked me to to preach on is basically a theology of worship space or theology of facilities to help give you an idea of what we're thinking through as leaders and also help equip the whole congregation because we're going to be thinking through this stuff as a congregation over the next several months, even a couple of years, and we want to be guided as much as possible, by God's spirit through His word.

Now, when I was 15 years old, I I came to a place where I felt like the Lord was actually calling me into ministry. And at that time, I thought that the ministry would be missions overseas somewhere or in Mexico or smuggling Bibles into Russia and stuff like that.

And the two things that I said is I would never be a pastor because I thought pastoring and missions were mutually mutually exclusive, shows you how much I knew about missions, and I said I would never be a pastor in the United States because I didn't want to have to deal with all of the materialistic baloney of facilities in the US. I wanted to get down into real ministry in Mexico where we could just meet in a hut. And not have to worry about all the politics of church and buildings and this and that.

So Lord has a real sense of humor.

And taking, me and put me in a position to be, at least a pastor who's trying to provide some guidance in the areas of facility. When we talk about toward a theology of corporate worship space, what we're really saying is what is our philosophy of facilities? And we're really trying to do systematic theology. We're saying, what does the whole Bible tell us about where to worship, the spaces that we should worship in.

And so on. And is there any information that we can get from the Bible that would help us as a church, at least give us some principles on, on, on how we should answer our questions as a body. And so I want to suggest we're gonna cover four different Thoughts, some thoughts that will help us work towards this theology of corporate worship space. We're going to get some thoughts from the Old Testament, we're going to get some thoughts from the New Testament.

We're going to try to summarize those thoughts. And then we're going to ask some practical questions in light of that, that apply to us right now in our church life. So hang in there with me. Let's start with the Old Testament.

We're going to do some systematic theology, trying to in a short period of time cover what does the whole Bible say about corporate worship space and how that answers some of the problems that we face as a congregation. So some thoughts from the Old Testament, we're gonna start with creation, go back to Genesis. And you have the great architect. This is in the beginning, God said, let there be light, and he creates this whole world and universe that we see.

And we see in places like Psalm 148, that people are worshiping the Lord, praise the Lord, praise the Lord from the heavens. Down to verse 4, praise them you heavens and heavens, you waters above the water, or waters above the heavens, let them praise the name of the Lord, for he commanded, and they were created. All of creation becomes an appropriate environment for worship. And yet God, even though people could worship Him wherever they are in the universe, God takes Adam and Eve and puts them in a particular location in His creation.

He puts them in the garden. And we see in Genesis, God walking in the cool of the day. And trying to find Adam and Eve, likely because they had a meeting time in the cool of the day to talk and for Adam and Eve to worship their Creator there in the garden. And so the particular place of worship that we see Adam and Eve would have had would be in that garden.

And then also in the Book of Genesis we see God commanding Noah to build this ark after the fall has occurred and worship has been. Disturbed. God has wanted to dwell with his people, but now that's been hammered, and now the world has gotten very wicked, and he's going to create this boat. He commands Noah to make this boat.

He gives him all of the different particulars out of gopher wood and to cover the outside with pitch and so on. Noah does not have to go to the local building inspector, and no inspector comes as that ramp is just a little too steep for the hippos. You got to get that down to 7% or below. OK.

He got it right from the Lord. It passed inspection, flying colors because the Lord designed it. And, and no doubt, Noah and the 8 folks that were on the boat worshiped God in that environment on a boat. Worship didn't cease when they got on the boat for 40 days, 40 nights, and then stayed on there until the land dried.

And as soon as they get off, they erect an altar and offer a sacrifice to the Lord. In the New Testament, we see that the ark is actually a type of Christ, who is the ultimate tabernacle, as we'll see here in a moment. But so we see in creation in a garden and a boat, are appropriate environments in the Old Testament for worship. But fourthly, we come to a part of the Old Testament where a special location is drawn up by our Lord called the tabernacle.

And God gives precise materials and measurements. To make this thing called the tabernacle, the holy place, and within it the ark. In Leviticus, we see that God comes and he blesses this place and fire comes from heaven, and lifts up the sacrifice and everybody shouts and falls on their faces the first time a worship service happens at the tabernacle, what an incredible worship service that would have been to be a part of. It was God's desire all the way back in the Old Testament to, to dwell, to make a special presence known in the tabernacle in that tent, and to be a God to His people.

Psalm 91:1, 99:1 says, let the people tremble. He dwells between the cherubim, that's at the ark. And then, after, Israel is off wandering in the wilderness, and the second generation comes along, and God begins to give them information and says, when you cross the Jordan and come into Canaan, and I lead you there, I'm going to put my name in a particular place. He doesn't tell them where that place is going to be.

But he says in Deuteronomy 12:5, he says, but you shall seek the place where the Lord your God chooses. Out from all your tribes to put his name for his dwelling place, even before they get into the land, God's saying there's going to be a particular place of worship, where the tabernacle is going to be set up and early in Israel's history, it was Mount Ebel. Then it was Shechem, there was Shiloh, and eventually it settles in Jerusalem. And Jerusalem becomes the place where the tabernacle is erected, and where people come to worship God.

That is the environment of worship at that point in Israel's history. As we move later into the history of God's people, we see that God calls Solomon, David's son, to build a temple, a permanent structure, a sanctuary, a house, courts, And God chooses to make his name and his presence known there. And Psalm 84, we see God's people, lifting up their voices and, and, and praising God for that place of his presence. Psalm 84 1.

How lovely is your dwelling place, so Lord of hosts. My soul longs, yes, faints for the courts of the Lord, my heart and flesh sing for the joy to the living God. So we got, we see God making his special presence known. God was always omnipresent.

But in this point of redemptive history, we see that if you wanted to come worship God and experience a special presence, you would have had to go to Jerusalem. Into the temple in order to worship God and experience his special presence. But even back then, people knew that they weren't containing God merely in that building. They knew that he was bigger than the buildings.

It's, it's just that he chose to make it manifest his special presence there. Now, after, as time marches on, you guys probably know the story that Israel begins to move away from the pure worship of God. They're worshiping false gods. God warns them many times.

Eventually, he brings us Syria from the north, in 722 BC, and he takes out the north, northern tribes. And there's continual sin in the south, and they do not repent. 586, Babylon and Nebuchadnezzar come down and they take out the South, and they destroy the temple, and they take the furniture and they take it up to Babylon, and they take the priests. So where are people going to worship God now?

This is the special place of God, a glory. This is where people are coming to meet the Lord. And you see mourning throughout the scriptures when this temple is destroyed and even when the people are up in Babylon, they're, they're refusing to sing songs as they sit by the rivers of Babylon because they're longing for Zion. And it's within this part of Israel's history that we don't see it on the pages of the Old Testament, but we come to the New Testament, we see the synagogue system.

And it begs the question, where did the synagogue system arise? It happened when they were in Babylon. They're in Babylon, there's no temple system. And so what did the Jews do to try to continue the, the teaching of their heritage and the teaching of the worship of Yahweh?

They developed the synagogues and they brought synagogues back down with them as they return. And so that brings us to Ezra's temple. When you have the return from exile, underneath Ezra and Zerubbabel, you have, during the time of Nehemiah who work on the walls, Ezra comes and begins to build up underneath the jurisdiction underneath the authority of King Cyrus, to build, rebuild that temple. And so now the people of God can worship again.

In this temple setting, the special place of God's presence. So in the Old Testament, just as a quick survey, we see that God was pleased. He's pleased to be worshiped anywhere in all of creation. He created it all.

He was pleased to be worshiped by Adam and Eve in a garden, he was pleased to be worshiped on a boat. He was worshiped in the tent of the tabernacle with very specific instructions, then very specific instructions in the temple, and then the rebuilding of the temple in Ezra. So in the Old Testament, God can be he can be worshiped anywhere. It's very clear that he gave very precise instructions on where his special presence would dwell.

And if you were an Old Testament saint, you would need to go to that place. That was the corporate place of worship in the Old Testament would be the temple. When we come to the New Testament, 2, some thoughts from the New Testament, we see immediately, a very different system begins to arise. Even in the wording that the apostle John chooses when he discusses Christ in the first chapter of the book of John, we see that Christ tabernacle among us.

John, the, the writer of the book of John says in verse 14, and the Word became flesh, and dwelt literally tabernacle among us, and we held His glory. Any Jew reading this material would not miss the connection between Christ's coming and being the ultimate tabernacle of the presence of God's Spirit. Something different is coming out. We used to worship in a temple.

Now Christ is where the Spirit's presence dwells. A second thought that we see from the New Testament, is that Christ predicted the destruction of the temple, and that there would be a new place of worship. In Luke 21:5, we see that Luke says then, As some spoke of the temple. And how it was adorned with beautiful stones and donations.

Jesus says this, these things which you see, the days will come in which not one stone shall be left upon another that shall not be thrown down. Jesus predicts the absolute destruction of the old way of worship where God's presence would be limited to one particular space. And he's talking to the woman at the well, the Samaritan woman, she says, well, we say that you worship the Lord here and the Jews say in Jerusalem, what do you say? And he says, the hour is coming.

And now is when true worshipers will worship the Father and Spirit and truth. There's going to be worship that happens. Not in Jerusalem, not in Samaria, but all over the world in various places and spaces. And so Christ comes in tabernacles among us.

He predicts the destruction of the temple and a new place of worship. And then when the church is birthed, what do we see? We see the infant church met both in the Jewish temple and from house to house. So before the temple is destroyed in 70 AD, the Christians are actually meeting in places like Solomon's porch to gather together and preach and worship and praise God, and they're also meeting.

Home to home. We see this in places like Acts 2:46. We see people like Aquila and Priscilla opening up their homes, and there's a church meeting in their home in Rome. We see others like in Colossian Colossians 4:15 and Philemon 1:1 that there's other churches that occur in people's homes and so the infant church we're meeting in both the temple and in homes.

We see, fourthly, that Paul makes it clear that the people of Christ are now the new temple. What was a physical structure in the Old Testament now is a spiritual body of people. Notice 2 Corinthians 6:6, where Paul says, for we are the temple of the living God. And then he goes to quote an Old Testament passage that applied to the physical temple.

And God said, I will make my dwelling among them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. So Paul says, we are the temple, Ephesians 2:21, in whom the whole building being fit together is growing into a holy temple in the Lord. 1 Corinthians 3:16, do you not know that you plural, are a temple of God, and the Spirit of God dwells in you, plural. And so we see a movement now, where instead of having this physical building called a temple where you had to go and meet to experience the presence of God, now God's spirit is dwelling within the people of God themselves, wherever they happen to meet.

And then we see lastly that the heavenly temple will come down to earth in the book of Revelation. We can also talk about Ezekiel's temple that's predicted, which we believe will be built during the millennial period. And so you have that going on as well. Well, how can we summarize these thoughts?

you may be sitting there just thinking, man, what the world is all this about? Old Testament, New Testament meeting place is great. It's really hot in here. let's meet outside.

We turned on the air last night around 11 o'clock. It was 90 degrees, and it got down. If you came to first service, it was sweet. It was really nice.

second service, so come to first service. 8:30 is really, really comfortable. I want to provide some summary thoughts here from what we see from Old and New Testament. This is not, everything that we can say on the subject, but some summary starting points for what we get from Scripture.

First of all, We see this, it has been God's design from Genesis revelation, to dwell with his people and receive their worship, right? It's been God's design to dwell with His people and receive their worship. This is clear from Genesis revelation. Secondly, anywhere in creation is an appropriate venue for worship.

God received worship in the garden, he received it on a boat, he received it in a tent, he received it in the temple. We moved the New Testament, it's in houses. And so, while there are portion or parts of church history or the history of God's people, where God restricted his presence, we see that there's lots of different venues, when you take both testaments into consideration. God was pleased to be worshiped in the specific places and structures in the Old Testament, but in this dispensation, God dwells in the New Testament temple, that is the church, the Assembly of God.

When we talk about the church, we're really talking about the people, not the building, even though we say, hey, let's go to church. Properly, what we're talking about is coming together with God's people. That's the church. And even like, I don't want to fault anybody.

Even I will sometimes refer to this room as the sanctuary, which means the holy place. Technically, that's imprecise, that's not precise theological terminology. This is not the sanctuary, right? The holy, this, you don't come into this room and experience the holy presence of God like he did in the Old Testament.

The sanctuary is you. And me together, that's the sanctuary. This is the auditorium. This is the worship place, whatever you want to call it.

the sanctuary is the people. in Acts, moving on, we see the description of worship in large and smaller settings, temples and homes. We see Luke describing what the early church did. They met in the temple, and they met in homes.

We can surmise from our study of the early church and history and culture, that the homes may have been small, or they may have been very large. a couple like Aquila and Priscilla who were business people who traveled would have had almost certainly a very large home to accommodate lots and lots of people. We have evidence within literature of early people at the turn of the century turning their homes into exclusively a worship center, taking their home, busting out a wall, and, and moving out and making it just a place.

So while technically you'd say they were having a church in their home, that home had been converted to basically a A church building As early as the first century, and we have archaeological evidence of that by about 20 2020.

also, there is no way we can summarize this, make this summary, there is no prescription. In the epistles about meeting space. In fact, the New Testament is remarkably silent about worship space, particularly against the backdrop of the Old Testament. When you look at all the particulars given in the Old Testament, you're to use this material.

Here's how long the curtains are going to be. Here's what, what you're going to do with the labor, and here's what you're going to do with the show bread, and, all these dimensions, you get the New Testament, there's none of that. The only thing you get is a description from Luke on they met in the temple and from house to house. And that's in a narrative passage where Luke is just describing what they did.

One of the things that we have to at least ask and be careful of is to not assume that a description demands a prescription. In other words, we could ask the question, why did the early church meet in homes for the first several generations? One answer to that could be that because God's spirit directed this, And with particular commands to only meet in homes. And that this is a pattern intended by the Spirit to be a warning against larger buildings for worship.

If that were true, we should see that in some of the prescriptive passage. We should see Paul saying and going back to what Luke says and saying, Luke informed you that the church met in the temple and from house to house. I'm telling you that that's the way the Spirit wants it. Don't let your church get above 50 or an amount that can fit comfortably into a home.

And that's what some people would argue today that because we have this description in Acts, that therefore we should have the prescription of only house churches. Anytime you get to churches meeting in a building like this, you're on biblical. There's a real problem with that hermeneutically. One of the rules or, of rules of thumb for biblical interpretation is that when you see something in a narrative passage, for to really make a big deal about it darkly, you also need to have some didactic interpretation of that narrative.

at Pentecost, when you have all this stuff going on with people speaking tongues and fire on top of people's heads and all this stuff going on, if Peter doesn't stand up and say this is what this means, nobody would have known. He gets up and gives didactic instruction on how to interpret the narrative. Here's what happened. And so we need to be careful that, while there's lessons to learn about the church meeting in the temple from house to house, there's some principles that we could say, hey, maybe this is some stuff that we should try and be a good idea without any prescriptive evidence, without any didactic teaching from Peter or Paul or one of the other things we have to be careful about making that a hard, fast doctrine.

Because there are others that would look at the evidence of the church meeting largely in homes in the first century or two and say, well, why did, why did they meet in homes? Well, one answer is persecution. You ain't going to go out and and and advertise your presence when, when you're, your people are getting killed. they were small in number at the time.

most of the church members at the beginning of the, infancy of the church were poor. It's interesting that once persecution stopped and the church got larger and more wealthy folks came into the church, all of a sudden buildings start popping up all over the place. So there's different ways to interpret the evidence. What we need is Holy Spirit inspired way to interpret the evidence, and the Bible doesn't interpret that evidence for us, you understand.

It just says they met in temples and house to house without Holy Spirit inspired interpretation of what to do with that. We can't really say, OK, well, we should only meet in homes. You really can't do that. Does that make sense?

Because there's a movement today that wants us to believe that if you're not meeting in homes, basically, it's unbiblical. And, and I, I would have issue with that. another way that we can summarize some of the teaching of the New Testament, the Old Testament, this is, thus, while God has been worshiped in temples and houses, there seems to be no compelling reason to say that he must be worshiped in a particular kind or size of space in this dispensation. The overwhelming emphasis in the New Testament is on the people of God, not the space of worship.

You understand that there's a big difference now between old and new. New Testament worship space is thus, and this is the crux. If you don't get anything else, this is it. New Testament worship space is thus an issue of form, not prescription.

It's a matter of form, not prescription. What do by that? It's been left up to the wisdom of various churches and leaders from culture and time period and time period to make decisions. It hasn't been prescribed by the Holy Spirit on how we're to construct our worship space.

And this is exactly what we see in church history around the world in an infinite variety of settings and structures where Christ is proclaimed and worshiped. He's worshiped in a hut in the mountains of Mexico. He's worshiped in homes in America. He's worshiped in schools in Canada.

He's worshiped in chapels in South America. He's worshiped in cathedrals in Europe. And biblically, in the New Testament, I don't think anyone else can look at any one of those forms and say, that's wrong. Because there's no prescription.

On that issue, it's a form issue. And it's been left up to us to be led of the Spirit in our culture and time period to figure out what is, what's God calling us to do. I love this summary by our pastor, Scott Bashore, who's a pastor in Buena Park. We're good friends with him.

And he has written a paper several years ago called the Biblical Philosophy of Church Ministry, and part of that paper deals with property, and here's what he says. A property ought not to be a final determiner of the church's direction. The church is not a building, but Christ's people and thus church facilities ought to facilitate ministry, not dictate it. While the church should be very wise in the stewardship of the things God grants it, it must always remember that people are more important than property.

The church can do without programs and property if need be, but its people and its principles are irreplaceable. That's a great summary of what we're seeing. From the Bible. Let me give you a contrasting thought from somebody from a totally different camp.

Totally different viewpoint on this issue. Here's a contrasting thought. From Giles Dimmock. He says, my earliest memory.

Of being in a church is the one I experienced as a todd. One good Friday when my mother took me to venerate the cross, I can still see in my mind's eye the crucifix with its silver corpse lying on a purple pillow at the entrance to the sanctuary. I remember bending over to venerate the crucifix, and I recall the soft light coming through the stained glass windows, the dark wood altar and the communion rail and the statues of Our Lady in Saint Joseph. I was mightily impressed with God's house.

And I knew it was different from other places. I'm not sure if I had been taken to a contemporary concrete bunker that passes for a church these days, whether my reaction would have been the same. It's a very interesting perspective. And from this perspective, The worship space.

Dictates the experience of God's presence. And there's a criticism of, of those that would meet, I would say, I would assume, not just concrete bunkers, but huts. and other places that are inappropriate. For worship, according to this viewpoint.

Now, at the same time, as, as we look at church history, I don't want to dispel the notion that there is something to be said for giving consideration to beauty and art and architecture. There's history throughout the church of thought that has been put into the theology of a building. And the beauty of a building and the art of a building and the way that a building can reflect glory, and how that we can worship God in that environment. And those are, I think, legitimate form issues.

And we don't want to be gnostic in our view, so Gnostic in our view of facilities. is that we say, hey, let's just go with no AC as it feels right now. And let's just, let's just lay on the floor with no chairs. And, let's make it as uncomfortable as possible so that we can really experience the Lord.

There you go. Preach it, man. Right?, that's, I think that's another extreme, and so. Anyway, let's let's move here, the final point is we want to apply what we've looked at in the Old Testament, New Testament, the summary statements to particular questions that we need to answer as a church.

OK, and I'm going to throw out some of these questions. Not, we don't have answers to all these questions, but this is what we're moving towards. We're trying to answer these questions. One of the questions is, what can we learn from churches of the past and the present?

And I hope to talk more about that at some later date just to, Give you a little bit of history of the church house movement and during Europa, the first church building in the 1st 3 centuries, and the basilicas and the reformed churches, and the Anabaptist churches, the early American churches, the modern church buildings. There's a lot you can learn about just looking at what's happened in church history. And we're not the first ones. Cornerstone didn't just pop up on the scene, and we're the first ones to start asking these questions.

It's been going on for a long time, all the way back to Jerome. We see problems arising that need to be answered, and Jerome says many build churches nowadays. The walls and pillars of glowing marble, their ceilings glittering with gold, their altar studded with jewels. Yet to the choice of Christ's ministers, no heed is paid.

And he's pointing out something that was going on in his day where everybody was really big on the building but not paying attention to the appropriate qualifications for pastors. Fast forward to today. In 1987, really. And I want to give you a little snippet of an article written by John Piper called Ramblings on Being in the City to Stay.

And this is at the beginning of their vision before they've really gotten a really big building campaign rolling and, and I just love what he has to say here. He says, right now, The church building is unsightly. The paint is peeling. The stucco is falling.

The trim is rotting. The shrubs are wild. The retaining wall is crumbling. The roof is patched, and the color is faded to a cross between Pepto-Bismol and peanut butter.

I don't know if you ever saw what our paint job looked like before. Frankly, it's a disgrace if your neighbor kept his house this way, you would be upset. He goes on to say, I hope that 7 years of living with you have proved that I am committed to a wartime simplicity, not peacetime luxury, but I do take showers with soap. And I had my 1983 Mercury undercoded, and I am writing this on a $3000 computer.

It's back in the 1980s when it really cost that much. And when we had our 4th child, we moved to a house with 3 bedrooms and a study. Just interesting stuff, as, as Bethlehem Baptist is trying to wrestle with this issue of upgrading and, and property and all this stuff, and, I, I can remember myself just Having judgmental thoughts about a couple of different issues. One, getting judgmental about a church that might throw in a lot of money into, their exterior or, or just to make it look, worshipy or whatever you wanna call it, and thinking, man, they ought to, why don't they take that money and give it to the poor?

Why, what's going on here? And I remember running across, the quote from Judas Iscariot when the lady came and broke the perfume over Christ, and he's, Judas Iscariot says, why didn't you just sell it and give it to the poor? Why are you, why are you wasting all that money on Christ? And the thing is, we may not land in a particular direction, but there are churches that spend a good deal of money to invest in the architecture and art of a property, and if you look at their books, they also give a lot to the poor.

And it's not mutually exclusive. and those are some of the things we need to think about. we may not go there, but, those are at least legitimate questions to ask or even the question of a church that moves to the suburbs. There's some churches that move out of the city and into the suburbs, and I've been critical of that until I started doing research on parking and realized that really to get adequate parking for a church, you need 2 parking spots or 1 parking spot for every 2 people that come to your church.

And because most people don't drive big vans with 8 people in it, they come by themselves or they come with 2 or 3. Some people come with 5. It's really about, it's about 1.8 to 2.5 people in a car that come to church. And so if you're going to have a place to park everybody in an urban setting, if we had 600 people coming to church, we need 300 parking spots.

It doesn't count the handicapped parking that the kiddies, the city is going to require you to have. You need 300 places that people are going to use, otherwise you're going to run out of parking. And that's why some people just say, we can't find space here, we got to move there. Now we might not do that.

But there's reasons why, why people make the decisions that they do. At the risk of boring you, I wanna read you one other quote from a guy. Who, It's a website that's about the philosophy of church planning. And in part of their philosophy, part 10 is on the facility.

You go plan a church, OK, where are you gonna meet? And this particular article, I'm just going to read you a short portion has some really neat things to say that you need to think about in your meeting space. And starting with the first slide here, American City councils, here we go. American city councils seem to be increasingly hostile towards churches for a simple reason tax revenue.

we, when we buy a piece of property, they don't get the tax revenue from us. We're a church. fewer and fewer church planners are available, are able to follow the traditional model of buying land and building their own church facility. Fewer city councils will grant conditional use permits to allow the leasing of commercial space.

Fewer school districts allow the use of their facilities. This is not a cause for despair. The Church of Christ grows in some places where the church buildings are not allowed at all. There's actually something very exciting about depending on the Lord to provide a facility in a place where it seems humanly impossible in Southern California, in Southern California, that is nearly everywhere.

Weakness will be power when leaning hard on thee. There is a fine line between a facility as an idol and a facility as a worship tool. Let's keep our focus on God, the ministry priorities he's given to our church, trusting that he will provide what our local church, churches need. And you can look it up online and it's like CP CP Philosophy, Part 10, and just a really great article about how church planners are thinking about this whole question.

So that's, the first question that we're asking is what can we learn from churches of the past and present, because lots of other churches have done this. Calvin's written for healing facilities. Luther's written all kinds of stuff. There's all kinds of stuff and and we're going, we're looking at that.

We're trying to figure out, OK, we don't have to reinvent the wheel. But the other question that we are asking and we want you guys to be asking and helping us with, and that is just what is our vision., we know what the centrality of our vision is here at Cornerstone, and that is we want to be gospel centered, right? We want to experience the gospel in all of its fullness. We want to exalt the Lord through worship, we want to edify the saints, want to evangelize the lost.

And every time we come together, whether, whether it's in the big group celebration or whether in our small groups, we want to experience the apostles' doctrine, prayer, fellowship, and the Lord's Supper. That's the big idea of what we're about as a church. But is, is that, is God calling all that gospel stuff to happen in an urban environment, or a suburban environment? Is God calling that stuff to happen in one, in a one service church, or a multiple service church?

for a long time, pretty much ever since we went to two services, there's been this thing in the back of our minds as leaders that, man, what can we do to get back to one service? We got to get back to one service. We got to get back to one service. That's a really nice appealing concept, and maybe that will be our philosophy.

But if we go to a one, if we become a one service church in philosophy, guess what that does? It doubles our auditorium size. It doubles the amount of square footage, or the property that we need. It means we need to increase Sunday school space by at least 1/3 because now we can't share any Sunday school space in multiple services.

And it means our parking has to double. Because we have to have one parking spot for every 2 people. So theoretically, let's say we move into an auditorium that seats 800 people or seats 1000 people. We need to have 500 parking spaces.

We need land that's big enough to build a 1000 seat auditorium, and we need that much more Sunday school space. That's dollars. Dollars and cents. We say, we're willing to go stay at 2 services.

Or more, then now we've cut the amount of square footage that we need in half, the amount of parking that we need in half. We can multiply our Sunday school space. We can, we can take that money and use it for other things. I'm just speaking.

Hey, what's our philosophy going to be? That's the questions. Those are some of the questions that we're asking. we have a burden to minister to the people that God is bringing us.

How can we accommodate what God seems to be doing? God is bringing us more and more people and just incredibly gifted people. And right here in this service, there's, you look around and there are some seats open. But once an auditorium gets at 80% capacity, it stops growing.

That's a rule all over the world. Because when somebody comes into an auditorium with a family of 5 or 6 in an auditorium this full, unless they sit there, they're not going to find a seat. Unless they come sit right here. And that's not always a real comfortable place for a visitor to sit right there.

There's nobody there, right? Anybody wanna come down? Jeff, Van Savages are always here. And so in this service right here, we've already outgrown it.

And so we need to figure out how, how are we going to minister to the people that God is bringing us. We've got to answer these questions yesterday. OK, So two services in the past. What we've done to try to accommodate our growth just to give you guys a brief little history, we used to be one service, we went to two services.

Then about a year ago we reconfigured the services to try to get more people to come to first service and it was successful. We now have a 60-40 split when Sunday school's in session, right? And so, but even with the 60-40 split and after what we've done, we need to take the next step. And so.

What facility, what space will best facilitate our vision as it's developing? Some of the questions here are, are we going to continue to be renters? We don't think that there's anything biblically that demands we be owners, be nice to be owners, be nice to have our own place. it's going to cost a lot of money.

We've been looking at property in the area here. There's a property down in University Park Avenue, 10,000 square foot building or shell that we could do something with, 4.3 or 4.75 acres we could buy right now. It's listed at $4 million. It's been reduced to a million dollars.

It's at $4 million. Right now we figure if we were to go on there and build it up and put everything that we need about 30,000 square feet, is probably what we need. That might be a little under what we need. We think this just ballparking, we think it would cost $9 million to do that project.

It's a lot of cash. That's scary. Now, God can provide that. He's a big God, right?

But that's, that's what we're talking about here. Are we going to rent? Are we going to buy, if we just moved down to the old DMV building over here on Spruce in Chicago, which now is taken up by somebody else, 20,000 square feet, 80 cents a square foot, it would cost us $15,000 just for the rent. It's going to cost us probably about a quarter of a million dollars to do the TI improvements, the tenant improvements.

That's not counting utilities right now. We pay less than $5000 a month for rent. No utilities. We pay less than $5000.

We're talking about tripling our rent, spending a quarter of a million dollars on TI improvements, and then paying utilities. It doesn't matter what we do, folks, we're talking about God's got to provide. Are we going to buy? Are we going to move to a school?

Right now we're in negotiations with our landlords EFC. We've made a proposal. They've come back with a counter proposal. We're considering that counter proposal right now.

We're hoping by the end of the year that we can get this thing worked out, but we don't honestly, we don't know where it's going to end up. OK, even if we stay here, we're talking about probably spending at least a million dollars in order to stay here. So we've been looking elsewhere again we think at this point that we need Around 30,000 square feet and that might be small. It could be right now we currently use 20,000 square feet on this property.

when we add that other building back here, it'll go up to about 22. Adding 8000 square feet may or may not facilitate the vision. How do we pay for it? Whatever we do, stay or go, how are we going to pay for this?

Pray, we're going to pray, and we're going to ask you guys to give. We're going to pray for God to provide. We see examples in the New Testament of the church coming together and giving and pulling the resources. We see in the Old Testament that the people gave so much that the artisans had to go to Moses and say, Stop, stop, there's too much.

And that's the problem we're praying for. OK. That's what we're praying for. Milton came to, the congregation a few months ago, and we said that part of this process, we're, we're obviously praying, and we're researching, we've hired consultants.

One of the consultants we've hired is Jonathan Jones. We, we believe that in order to pay, for a consultant and all the different fees that are going to be involved in and just doing the research we've set aside $20,000 in order to do that. The elders have donated $4000 out of our own pockets to kickstart this, and we've asked you guys to, to try to meet us to get that $20,000 and we have not done that, and I think mostly that's our fault because we haven't kept the vision before you.

You've probably some of you guys are probably like, whoa, it's the first time I've heard of that.

we, we need, I don't, I don't have the exact number with me, but we've done, the elders have donated $4000. We need $20,000 to finish the research. and to pay Jonathan and get the fees and all the stuff that we need. And so we need you to pray about helping us get that $20,000 and that's just a drop in the bucket of what we're going to need in the future to pull ourselves together.

We're asking questions like, are we going to borrow money? We've always thought it'd be really nice to not have to borrow money. Other churches that we've looked at like Piper's Church and Bethlehem Baptist and MacArthur's Church and A lot of people have to borrow money in order to get it done, and we don't know where the Lord's going to lead us with that. So pray in that respect.

How do we get from here to there? Again, we need to pray, we need to have faith in a big God. God is a big God, and he can do big things. And on the front end of what we're trying to do is not to be intimidated by the money questions at this point, that's reality.

We're gonna have to address that. But right now, we want to look to God and see what does he want us to do. And then we'll start addressing the real money questions that have to be answered at some point. But let's not let the money questions intimidate us out of asking God for big things.

That's what, that's where our starting point. Now it might be God, we have this big huge vision. And then God says, well, let's do this, right? Or it might be we have this vision.

God says, let's do this. We're waiting on God to see what he's gonna do. We're gonna, we're getting counsel. Guys like Jonathan Jones, Strassenberg, Tim Miller, we're asking people outside the church, inside the church, and we're going to be asking, bringing more and more stuff to you.

I guarantee you that it'll never happen that Pastor Milton comes up to the pulpit one Sunday and says, guess what? We've decided we're going to buy this property and we need you to start giving. That's not gonna happen, believe me. You guys are gonna be really involved in this process, as we're trying to figure out what to do, and we want to hear what God is telling you, as well as what he's telling the leadership, and there's no way we're moving forward without God's complete direction in this stuff.

OK, so that's, that's really where it's at is, we believe, theologically, that the facility question, the question of worship space is a form issue. We don't believe that there's any precise direction that tells us we must be urban or we must be this big, we must be this smaller, we must have this facility. It's a wisdom issue. that we need to decide for our church and our culture and our people that God's given us.

And we believe that God will guide our leaders and guide our people as we seek a multitude of counselors, and we try to keep our focus on Him and on the spiritual part of our vision. And then we'll just see what God does. So, but one of the action points that you guys can be doing is one, pray. To any counsel that you guys have, feel free to give it to us.

I've got some great pieces of counsel right after the first service on things that we could look into. Pray right now, as a family, what can your family do to pull back in your spending, areas of spending in order to secure more money for the future that we can bring together as a congregation to accomplish whatever God's going to do. Again, if we stay here, it's going to be a million dollars. If we go elsewhere, at the very least, it's going to be, if we buy elsewhere, at the very least, we're talking $33 million or more.

if we lease, if we move elsewhere and start leasing, we're talking about going up to $2,000,000 to $25,000 to $30,000 a month. OK, so we're talking about, quadrupling or more, our investment in facilities, OK? And so we need our people, we need you to be praying about how is God calling us to come together to accomplish this vision. All right?

OK, so that's where we're at. And that's, That is the toward the theology of corporate worship space, right? So let's pray, and we're gonna have our ushers come down, and we're gonna worship the Lord with our offerings now. Lord, we thank you for your word.

And we thank you for speaking to us this morning. We pray God.