I have the book Pagan Christianity and it's a real eye opener.
Here's an excerpt from Chapter 3 called "The Church Building: Inheriting the Edifice Complex. (I will color green all quotes from the book, the black are mine.)
The modern Christian has a love affiar with brick and mortar. The edifice complex is so ingrained in our thinking, that if a group of believers begins to meet together, their first thoughts are toward securing a building. for how can a group of Christians rightfully claim to be a church without a building? (So the thinking goes.)
The church building is so connected with the idea of church that we unconsciously equate the two.
We talk about how big the church (building) is.
We talk about the church (building) being cold or hot.
We say the church (building) has been our home for many years.
We talk about the church (building) being the house of God.
It can be rightly said that Christiaity was the first nontemple based religion ever to emerge. In the minds of the early Christians, it is the people that constitute a sacred space, not the architecture. The early Christians understood that they themselves--corporately---were the temples of God and the house of God.
Strikingly, nowhere in the NT do we find the terms "church" (ekklesia), "Temple," or "house of God" used to refer to a building. To the ears of a first-century Christian, calling a building an ekklesia (church) would be like calling a woman a skyscraper!
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