Christians have an ambiguous relationship with our church buildings. On the one hand are minds and hearts are lifted up to God when we enter into a beautiful church like St. Peter’s in Rome. You feel the presence of the sacred. On the other hand, church buildings are not essential to being church. After all, for the first three hundred years Christians did without churches. The powerful vision of the temple in the Prophet Ezekiel was written at a time when the temple had been destroyed. St. Paul reminds us that it is the individual believer that is the temple of the Lord. And Jesus says that his body and not the brick and stone which mark the real presence of God in the world.
