Theology, ideology and the way that we build and use our corporate spaces interact.

In the days of the Constantinian settlement, the newly established church took the Roman basilica as the model for its now-public buildings, rather than the house [one suspects, the dining room] that had been its previous abode. The basilica was a law court, and the Christians swapped the magistrate’s throne for an altar and sat the elders in the tribune behind it, thus imaging God as both judge and Emperor, surrounded by His government. We have been haunted by that decision ever since. We still build our churches with an important end, where the leaders are and God is implied to be, faced by everyone else. Our buildings tell us that the people at that end are more important than the people at the other, have a greater right to speak and be heard, are more representative of God. To make a church look like ‘a church’ is to impose a set of implied power relationships on our community that may not be desirable or in their best interests.

It is easy to see how this means that worship spaces are analysable in terms familiar to cultural analysts: in terms of solidarity, power, compliance and resistance, hegemony. Theologically we then have to ask whether the results are theologically valid and in turn whether the ‘message’ embodied is missionally justifiable.

In this article, Steve Collins poses some interesting questions about ‘new’ worship spaces. My question is, though, what’s being said about power  and solidarity?