Читать книгу Planning the Church Year - Leonel L. Mitchell - Страница 9

The first resource most congregations have is a church building. It may be a blessing, a headache, an unmitigated disaster, or all three, but it exists, and discovering how best to use it is one of the planner’s first tasks. Is it too small? Is crowding a problem? Or is it too large and needs to be made functionally smaller? It contains a number of fixed and movable church furnishings, such as an altar, a font, a lectern, or pulpit or both, pews or chairs, and choir stalls. These may be badly located, making it difficult for people to participate actively in the liturgy. If they are easily movable, consideration should be given to moving them, and if they are not, then planners need to consider seriously how to make the best possible use of their good features and to minimize their faults. Often people within the congregation or available for consultation in the community or through the diocese can help a congregation answer these questions.

Obviously, for worship we need a protected space where we can gather around a table, a reading stand, and, on some occasions, a font. Some church buildings come close to failing to meet these minimum requirements. Their setups prevent gathering, or their environments are so unfriendly as to preclude doing anything together. Often real work is needed to make a building built in a different time suitable for our worship, but the work is worth doing.