Shrines and Churches

Sometimes, when we need to experience God more profoundly, we need a shrine: “a sacred place of worship associated with a holy person or event.” Shrines are where we connect, through memory, imagination, contemplation, and prayer, with inspiring people and events in the past.

An experience of pilgrimage is often a journey to a shrine. We stand in places where others once gave their hearts, souls, and often their lives for the love of God – and then we too are inspired to give our hearts, souls, and even our lives as well.

But much more often, when we need to experience God more profoundly, what we need is not a shrine, but a church. Whereas a shrine is a sacred place of worship in which we connect with people or events from the past, a church is a sacred people living in the present. Shrines inspire us to follow the example of those who went before, and to remember what God has done. Churches are intentional communities of living people who support, encourage, and spur one another more deeply into our common faith.

Not all intentional communities are religious in nature, but all intentional communities are people striving together with a common vision, and are designed to promote a much higher degree of social interaction than other communities. Members of intentional communities are often drawn together by a common social, political or spiritual vision, and by the hope of making a better world by working together. But what happens to us when we become community transforms more than the world around us: it even more profoundly transforms us.

Sometimes, when a group of people become an intentional community of Jesus followers, their experience is so transforming that someday, long after they’re gone, those not yet born might come to the place where that community lived, served, transformed, and died. Those not yet born might turn the place into a shrine, and many would come to be inspired. If so, those not yet born may restore the place, protect it, and care for it, which is a good, holy, and respectful thing to do. But the shrine comes long after that community has lived and died.

In the meantime, we remember that our weekly experience of worship is not our coming to a shrine to remember people and events of the past. Our weekly experience is all about our becoming a transformed and transforming community of Jesus followers. We sometimes journey to shrines. But more profoundly, we are presently becoming a community in Christ.

To know Christ, together, and together, to make him known