Historically, the church has usually met in buildings. Those buildings were temples (Acts 2:46, et al.), homes (Acts 2:46, et al.), lecture halls (Acts 19:9), and any other building they could find. During the first three centuries, while Christianity was persecuted, the building of choice for most local congregations was the house of a believer. The excavated house church at Dura Europas (241 A.D.) shows how some Christians even put baptisteries in their homes! (Yes, it was a baptistery that people could be immersed in!) The house has always been a great place for the church to use as a base of operations.
When Christianity became legal in the Roman Empire, many of the local churches began to meet in remodeled temples of the Roman gods. As time passed, the beautiful basilicas were built by local churches. The Reformation brought new structures built by disciples of the reformers. When North America was colonized, buildings appeared according to the area of the local church. If the local church was in a city, the building would reflect the look of the city. If the local church was in the country, the building would be rustic like the country.
When the Southern Baptist Convention was founded, many of the local churches that formed the convention were already established in a building. Mission work in North America was destitute during the tumultuous years from 1845 to 1881 as only 321 churches were planted with the support of the Home Mission Board.
It all changed when I. T. Tichenor became the corresponding secretary of the Home Mission Board in 1882. From 1882 to 1900, over 11,000 churches were planted! Tichenor advocated planting churches anywhere and anytime, but he also pushed for the HMB to assist the new churches in land and buildings. During his tenure, 1134 “houses of worship” were constructed for new churches and 595 existing churches received aid to update their “houses of worship.” Tichenor was given authority by the Board to buy 100 acres in Texas, which he did. With the cooperation of the two state conventions in Texas, Tichenor sent church planting missionaries into Texas, often (not always) telling them to go to an area he had purchased and begin winning people to Christ. Usually, these missionaries had three or four “mission stations” in which they won people to Christ and planted churches. When the local church had about 20 to 40 people, they began building a small structure, often assisted by a grant given by Tichenor’s Home Mission Board. The local church would then become the hub of the community. In addition to the church using the building, the building was often used as a local school, a meeting place for the political meetings, a meeting place for businesses, or a meeting place for social activities.
Although Tichenor encouraged church plants to begin anywhere, he knew church plants would struggle for permanency until they had a building of their own. In 1883, Tichenor pushed the SBC for more funds to build “houses of worship,” stating “With a house of worship, a church will soon care for its own wants; without it, the effort at permanent establishment is prolonged into years of toil. In many places more can be accomplished by money to build houses than to support Missionaries.”
Tichenor also reasoned that the SBC would eventually see a financial return from these local churches. He stated in 1884, “For in building a house of worship in a destitute section, or in stimulating the community to build, we give prominence and dignity to the cause of Christ, we contribute to the efficiency of the laborer, we insure permanency to the results and we practice a wise economy in handling the Lord’s money; for generally when an organized church gets into a house of worship it ceases to be a missionary station and becomes self-supporting, and if properly instructed, at an early day becomes a contributor to the cause of missions.”
By the time of Tichenor’s retirement in 1900, over a thousand Baptist churches built a building with the help of the Home Mission Board (just look at your own church’s history!). The same year, the SBC put together the Tichenor Memorial Building Fund to give grants and interest-free loans to new churches. This practice filtered down to the state conventions and many of our state conventions held property for many years. Nevertheless, this is not the practice of our state conventions or SBC today.
I am not saying a building is a church. I am not saying a church needs a building to be a church. I am not saying a network of house churches is not a good idea (it is actually a great idea! Nevertheless, they still meet in “buildings”). I am saying, in a free society, a church plant that is helped with purchasing land and building a building that is used for more than the activities of the church was, and still is, a great idea.
Posted on
Mon, May 16, 2011
by NTBA