Last Sunday I took the bus to church. As I passed through little Chinatown in Toronto, I saw an old, boarded-up Salvation Army building. In the early days of Toronto’s history, this church would have served a growing city population. Most recently it operated as a temporary shelter, housing a transient population. Now it just sits there, empty and useless.

What happened to the congregation that worshipped there for so many years? Although the Salvation Army church has closed down, people still live in houses and apartments throughout that community. What happened to the social outreach program? The homeless still sleep along that very street in store alcoves and sometimes even in the Army’s abandoned parking lot.

Over the years, we’ve put a lot of emphasis on church buildings and the numerical growth of our Movement. At times, this has interfered with the ongoing spiritual development of our people and resulted in the over-extension of our resources. Today we have too many empty buildings, too many weak Christians and too many former Salvationists who have stopped caring about the Church’s mission.

One of my favourite heroes of the faith is Oscar Romero. Whenever I get too preoccupied with church activities or the politics that come with working for a Christian organization, I take some time to read his words. Romero never fails to strip away all of the unnecessary church nonsense and remind me of the essentials of serving Jesus Christ. In The Violence of Love, Romero says:

Let us not measure the Church by the number of its members
   or by its material buildings.
The Church has built many houses of worship,
   many seminaries,
   many buildings that have been taken from her.
They have been stolen
   and turned into libraries
   and barracks
   and markets
   and other things.
That doesn’t matter.
The material walls here will be left behind in history.
What matters is you, the people,
   your hearts.
   God’s grace giving you God’s truth and life.
Don’t measure yourselves by your numbers.
Measure yourselves by the sincerity of heart
with which you follow the truth and light
   of our divine Redeemer.

We need to look beyond our walls and reach out to our communities. If we become too caught up in the activities we plan inside our churches, we will lose sight of the needs outside. And that leads to irrelevance and eventually empty buildings. We exist for the people outside our material walls, not for the personal satisfaction of those inside. What happens inside should prepare us for what could happen outside. When we lose sight of that, our church suffers. And then our community suffers, our nation suffers, and the world suffers.

As Romero says:

When we struggle for human rights,
   for freedom,
   for dignity,
when we feel that it is a ministry of the Church
to concern itself for those who are hungry,
for those who are deprived,
we are not departing from God’s promise.
He comes to free us from sin,
and the Church knows that sin’s consequences
are all such injustices and abuses.
The Church knows it is saving the world
when it undertakes to speak also of such things.

Let’s focus less on building material walls and focus more on building mission-focused Christians who will break down the barriers in society. I’ll let Romero have the final word:

Let them steal our material churches;
   the Church’s history is full of that.
That’s not why the Church is on earth.
The Church is something different, says Christ.
The Church seeks adorers of God in Spirit and in truth,
and that can be done
   under a tree, on a mountain, by the sea.
Wherever there is a sincere heart that seeks God sincerely,
   there is true religion.
This, my friends, scandalizes many
   because many have wanted to tie the Church
   to these material things.
They call this prestige,
   they call it faithfulness to their traditions.
But it can be a betrayal of the Church’s truth.
God is Spirit
   and does not need the powers and things of earth.
He seeks sincerity in the heart.

John McAlister is the editor of Salvationist.ca and the associate editor of Salvationist magazine. He recently returned to Canada from Zimbabwe, where he and his wife, Rochelle, worked for two years with The Salvation Army. John and Rochelle are expecting their first child in November.