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- Title
Blessed are the Consumerists: The Ideology of Contemporary Mega Church Architecture.
- Authors
Falconer, Robert
- Abstract
Church architecture is commonly a tactile expression of theology, revealing to us who we are, what we believe and how we practise Christianity. While the content of the Gospel message is significantly more important than church architecture, we nevertheless ought to work towards an architecture that creatively and meaningfully expresses Biblical Christianity, its faith, theology and praxis. In this paper I argue that most contemporary mega church architecture is unfortunately an expression of consumer-capitalist ideology, and fails to contrast itself as 'other', by aligning itself with secular architectural typologies. These generally govern the form, space and aesthetics of the contemporary mega church. It is argued that contrary to good architectural design theory, the mega church building all too often is a form that does not follow function, but is rather a manifestation of consumerism and capitalism. And while this manifestation of ideology is arguably noble, because of its apparent evangelistic objective, I demonstrate that this is problematic on several accounts, ultimately offering an inversion of authentic Christian community. The paper then endeavours to offer countercultural ideologies from Scripture that are often in contrast to the ideologies of the mega church and its Christianity. Some of these Biblical ideologies and other ideas are then developed into features that might inform any church architecture. It is hoped that further reflection on this topic would encourage a Biblical theology and spirituality that leads to world-class church design.
- Subjects
CHURCH architecture; CHRISTIANITY; CHURCH building design &; construction; CONSUMERISM; IDEALISM (Personality trait); ART &; religion
- Publication
Conspectus (South African Theological Seminary), 2017, Vol 24, p65
- ISSN
1996-8167
- Publication type
Article