DEVOTIONAL: A weekly reflection on faith, family and life in Jamaica.
“The glory of this latter house shall be greater than of the former, saith the Lord of hosts: and in this place will I give peace.” Haggai 2:9
In Black River, St Elizabeth, there is a belfry and a clock tower standing almost alone.
They are what Hurricane Melissa left of St John’s Anglican Church last October. The foundation stone of that church was laid in 1837. Its people had worshipped there through emancipation, independence and nearly two centuries of storms. Its old bell, its clock and its organ were all lost. In one night, a building that had outlived generations was gone.
Across western Jamaica, the same story was repeated in different ways. Roofs peeled off. Walls fell. The Government has said thousands of churches were affected. Many congregations spent the following Sundays worshipping under tarpaulin, in the open air, or in a member’s yard.
If you have ever stood in the ruins of a church you loved, you know the feeling. It is grief, but it is also a question. Where is God, now that His house is broken?
The old men who wept
The Bible knows this feeling well. When the Jewish exiles returned from Babylon to Jerusalem, Solomon’s temple lay in ruins. They began to rebuild, and when the new foundation was laid, many shouted for joy.
But the older people wept.
Ezra records that “many of the priests and Levites and chief of the fathers, who were ancient men, that had seen the first house, when the foundation of this house was laid before their eyes, wept with a loud voice.” They remembered the old building. They knew the new one would not match it.
It was into that grief that God spoke through the prophet Haggai. He did not deny that the new temple looked smaller. Instead He made a promise: “The glory of this latter house shall be greater than of the former.”
The glory, God was saying, had never been in the stones.
A congregation that let go
This week, an unusual story came out of a place called Jamaica, in Queens, New York. St Stephen’s Episcopal Church, a historically Black congregation founded there in 1902, has merged with a nearby church and is selling its old building. Its last service in the old sanctuary was held in September.
That must have been painful. More than a century of baptisms, weddings and funerals took place inside those walls. And yet the priest leading the merged congregation spoke not of loss, but of possibility. What excited him, he said, was “what becomes possible when we no longer have to devote so much energy and resources to maintaining aging buildings.”
Some will disagree with that choice. But it raises a question every congregation should ask. Are we serving God with our building, or have we started serving the building?
God does not live in buildings
Paul stood in Athens surrounded by magnificent temples and said something startling: “God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands.”
That does not mean buildings do not matter. They do. A church building is a place of memory, shelter and gathering. After Melissa, many church halls became shelters, classrooms and distribution centres. Rebuilding them is good and necessary work.
But a building is a tool, not a temple. When the roof comes off, the church does not disappear. It simply becomes visible in a different way: in the members who carry food to a neighbour, the deacon who climbs a ladder to fix a roof that is not his, and the congregation that keeps singing under a tarpaulin.
What Melissa revealed
Perhaps one gift of a disaster is that it shows us what was really holding us together. In many districts last year, it was not the building that sheltered the community. It was the church people: opening their homes, sharing water, checking on the elderly, praying with the frightened.
That is the house God promised would have greater glory. Not a bigger building, but a people filled with His presence. “In this place will I give peace.”
This Week’s Reflection
If your church building was damaged, or if your congregation is struggling to keep an old building standing, take heart. God has not moved out.
And if your church building is safe and sound, ask yourself a harder question. If it disappeared tomorrow, would your community still know that the church was there?
Prayer: Lord, You do not live in temples made with hands, yet You meet us in every place we gather in Your name. Comfort those who have lost buildings they loved. Give wisdom to congregations deciding how to rebuild. Make us a living house whose glory is Your presence, not our walls. And in every broken place in Jamaica, give peace. Amen.
Read deeper: Haggai 2:1 to 9; Ezra 3:10 to 13; Acts 17:24 to 28; 1 Corinthians 3:16.
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