Write down for the coming generation what the Lord has done, so that people not yet born will praise him.
– Psalms 102:18
A LEGACY PROJECT OF PEACTHREE ROAD
404.266.2373
[email protected]
prumc.org
The Romance of a Church Building
Copied from a report from the Building Committee, August 19, 1947
Clyde M. Kennedy, Jr., Chairman
Nat. G. Long, Pastor
A church edifice is a symbol, it speaks without words.
It stands in a community for the presence of God. We daringly call it “The House of God.”
He, Too, has a home in our community, built by loving hands and adoring hearts.
A church building symbolizes man’s age-long hunger for something besides things.
It recalls men to the principles which have made this nation great.
For this reason, a church should be recognizably distinct from every other kind of building.
The structure itself should suggest eternal truths which the community cannot afford to forget.
There is romance in building a bridge, a factory… a school, anything which develops community….
But the romance of building a church is greater still.
Not many months ago, there was a tract of bare ground with a blank wall at one end of it.
The stone was still in the quarries.
The wood was standing timber.
The glass was in neat piles of tiny panes in the cubbyholes of a faraway shop.
The tin, copper, and brass of the organ pipes had not yet been shaped that they could sing.
Now these various fabrics have been fashioned into a shrine beneath whose high and hospitable roof
man engage in the highest act of which men are capable, communion with the infinite and eternal
Creator Spirit whom our spirits are akin.
Already its walls are bathed in the atmosphere of prayer and praise.
To it through the years young men and women will come to plight their marriage vows.
To it little children will be brought to be dedicated to God in the beautiful rite of baptism.
To it our dear dead will be borne for the tender offices of faith, hope, and love.
From its pulpit the good news of a gracious God will be proclaimed.
From its altar will be distributed the sacred symbols of God’s grace, validated by a love of which the
cross is the measure and the sign.
We who built it dare to hope that our children and children’s children will gather in it long after we are
gone, to pledge their allegiance to the ancient loyalties which alone can transform this beautiful but
shadowed world into a family of God, wherein men know and feel themselves brethren because of their
common origin and destiny in Him.
Write down for the coming generation what the Lord has done, so that people not yet born will praise him.
– Psalms 102:18
A LEGACY PROJECT OF PEACTHREE ROAD
404.266.2373
[email protected]
prumc.org