One of my first lessons in really thinking about the concept of church occurred when I was taking an introductory class in architecture in college.
We were asked to make a model of a church out of sugar cubes. For many of us this was a puzzling assignment—why a church, and why sugar cubes? As it turned out, sugar cubes make a simple building material, easily utilized by anyone, and they look very much like the large blocks of stone that tend to be associated with traditional church building materials. What we quickly began to see is that a church building is a structure that is easily stereotyped—a basic design that might include a boxy shape with a steeple on top. We realized that the point of this assignment was to challenge us to look beyond conventional thinking and consider new perspectives of what a church represents in the community and how this can be depicted architecturally—rather than accepting stereotypical concepts of structure and function. It was a reminder to be open to fresh ways of utilizing space and communicating a church’s purpose. We quickly saw that a church could be illustrated in an infinite variety of ways, depending on the needs of the congregation and the community.
This has served me well in the many years since, in looking at any situation without the limitations of stereotyping, but particularly in regard to a deepening understanding of the spiritual sense of “Church” that Mary Baker Eddy envisioned for mankind in her founding of The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and its branches and societies around the world. Seeing beyond the merely physical structure or the human organization of a church, she saw to the deeper spiritual sense of Church when she defined it as, “The structure of Truth and Love; whatever rests upon and proceeds from divine Principle” (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 583). Truth, Love, and Principle are all terms for the unrestricted, omnipresent, all-powerful, always original God. In that ideal of Church, we have a blueprint for building without limits of any sort, and one that is never confined to a physical structure.
