Architecture and Liturgy

Extract

The word liturgy in the New Testament seems to express a thing already complete in itself, not requiring association with architecture. The minister, the people, the bread and the wine, are the essential association of living souls and earthly elements. The Christian temple built in three days is an edifice not made with hands. The Christian worshipping, fulfilling the duty of liturgy, is a person not of this world and only in this world for a time. He treads this earth lightly, looking for the appearing of His Lord to build a new earth, and introduce a state of things where human dimensions of length, breadth and height become something else and infinitely greater, associated with the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ. The New Testament uses the word liturgy in the context of expectation of this development which can only be described in language seeming to exclude the thought that a building fit to house this Christian worship can be made with hands. The word church never means the house itself. It means the people, the living stones out of which the temple not made with hands is built. Thus what we call the apostolic age would not have thought it an affectation, when recently an Anglican presbyter, introducing from his church on Saturday evening television a programme for the next day to consist of the liturgy for that day, said, ‘This building is not the church, but the Church meets here.’