How Do You Feel About Church?

There is a word that, when a Catholic hears it, kindles all his feeling of love and bliss; that stirs all the depths of his religious sensibilities, from dread and awe of the Last Judgment to the sweetness of God’s presence; and that certainly awakens in him the feeling of home; the feeling that only a child has in relation to its mother, made up of gratitude, reverence, and devoted love; the feeling that overcomes one when, after a long absence, one returns to one’s home, the home of one’s childhood.

And there is a word that to Protestants has the sound of something infinitely commonplace, more or less indifferent and superfluous, that does not make their heart beat faster; something with which a sense of boredom is so often associated, or which at any rate does not lend wings to our religious feelings – and yet our fate is sealed, if we are unable again to attach a new, or perhaps a very old, meaning to it. Woe to us if that word does not become important to us soon again, does not become important in our lives.

Yes, the word to which I am referring is ‘Church,’ …
– Bonhoeffer

I know this feeling. I’ve felt it before, and sometimes I still feel it. There is a reason they had Michelangelo paint the Sistine Chapel. It created a massive feeling of involvement in God’s world on behalf of the people. And it certainly is not about the building. It is about what happens in the building, and who is in the building. The building gives meaning to that. I certainly do not mean to suggest that because, as Protestants, we don’t have famous painters decorating our ceilings we do not care about what goes on inside the walls. But in my own experience in different settings and different churches I’ve founded a marked difference. The Catholics and Anglicans treat church and Church as very serious (despite what we might think of strangeness and hypocritical eccentrices), whereas it does not seem that Protestants do. And that is just my thought and experience on the matter. We say that church and Church are very important, but our actions do not seem to match. And it makes me sad.