An all-too familiar sight caught my attention this morning as I scanned the papers: yet another church building had been sold. Restaurant Aptos in Stirling, South Australia, with a $495 17-course degustation menu, recently opened in the historic building. It is being touted as one of the most audacious fine dining ventures in recent times. For every story that makes the news, many more churches are closing their doors and lay dormant for years before an entrepreneur snatches up their property. Just in the small part of Melbourne where I live, several churches have shut in the last decade. Reasons for closure vary: a dying congregation in an ageing community, a dead church void of the gospel, or the harsh reality of economics.
We need more churches. More evangelical churches, to be precise: churches built on the apostolic testimony, preaching Christ crucified, and living out the faith in love and godliness.
The Pantheon and the Hagia Sophia
Throughout history Christians have been effective redeemers, transforming pagan sites into places to worship the one true God. The famed Pantheon of Rome has stood for 2 000 years. Originally built by Caesar Augustus as a temple to the gods, this majestic structure was converted into a church in the seventh century and remains a Roman Catholic church to this day.
The opposite also happens, perhaps most famously in Istanbul. The Hagia Sophia stood as a Christian church in the city, then known as Constantinople, for almost 1 000 years, one of the world’s most incredible architectural feats. The Ottoman conquest of the city in AD 1453 saw the Hagia Sophia converted into a mosque. In more recent times the Hagia Sophia became a museum, until 2020 when President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, determined to change once again to a mosque, a Muslim house of prayer.
Throughout Australia, hundreds of hagia sophias have ceased to be places of Christian worship and turned into places for the worship of hedonistic recreation, and occasionally the conscious worship of false gods.
It is important to be clear: the church is not its building. The church is the people, the body of Christ who are covenanted to one another and who congregate in the same space for mutual edification, discipleship, and love. A church can just as successfully meet in a in a community hall or family lounge room as it can in a Byzantine basilica. The answer to how and where churches are started will depend on a hundreds of factors. But the closure and conversion of church buildings is a very visible sign of the shrinking, merging and dispersal of congregations in our day.
The Glory and Goodness of the Church of Christ
In the ancient metropolis of Ephesus, where a great temple to a pagan god loomed, the true and living God visited the city with his gospel and he started building a new temple. Not a shrine made of marble and filled with sculptures; but an assembly of ordinary people joined together by the good news of Jesus Christ:
[Christ] came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near. For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit.
Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit. (Ephesians 2:15–12)
Christ is the Saviour and Lord of his church. The word of God gathers and grows the church. Gospel-transformed individual lives and church community display the glory and grace of God to the city and beyond.
In our day, when everyone recognises that our society has become more fractious and distrusting than ever; where hope so often evades; where forgiveness is desperately needed but seemingly absent, a forgiven and hope-filled people have something precious and glorious indeed. We can display this glory not with ostentatious, performative acts, but with humility and kindness, accompanied by persistent gospelling.
We need more churches. Melbourne needs more churches. Australia’s cities and towns need more churches. New churches are starting and other church are revitalising, but we are far from the point where church growth is stemming the tide of church decline. I think we are beginning to witness a gentle shift; many churches are seeing an increase in people visiting and picking up a Bible who have never been to church before. The fact remains, we need more churches.
Renewed Confidence in Church-Based Mission Strategy
For many years, church growth experts talked down the church and claimed that Christianity’s future rests elsewhere. There were calls to distance ourselves from ‘trad’ models of church and find ‘new expressions’; calls to dump church altogether and instead start ‘missional’ cafés and knitting clubs. However, in the last couple of years, church-based mission has been making a comeback. It’s not rocket science, the book of Acts models the mission to us: preach the gospel and start churches.
It appears to me that in the last few years, mainstream Christian denominations have also started paying attention to this resurgence and formally recognised that the future needs more churches. Whether this stems from financial desperation or renewed gospel conviction, time will tell. Christian denominations (both the growing and the dying) are giving a shout-out to church planting and praising ‘conventional’ churches.
Church, Tradition and Generation Z
The emerging generation of Aussies desire substance over fluff, depth over superficiality. New Christians and intrigued unbelievers are interested in things like systematic theology and historic creeds. Everyday Aussies are looking for genuine spiritual remedies, not yet another sentimental or consumeristic placebo.
Most Australians, growing up with little-to-zero knowledge, are quite confused about Christianity—how to discern the difference between biblical tradition and medieval ecclesiastical tradition, for example. For readers who find themselves or those around them gravitating toward what they perceive as older and more authentic versions of Christianity, I highly recommend Gavin Ortlund’s YouTube channel Truth Unites.
The Scale of the Task
The task facing churches in Melbourne today is quite staggering. We need big churches and small churches, churches speaking in different languages, and meeting in varied places. There are different ways to speak of numbers, but here is one way to describe the magnitude of the gospel need. Melbourne’s population is growing by around 100 000 per annum. To visualise how many people that is: if just 10% of these new Melbournians were in churches, that would be the equivalent of fifty churches of 200 people. And this is before we consider the evangelistic need among the 5 million people already living in our great city.
One of the amazing graces given to us in Melbourne is that the nations have come to us and are making home among us. The Great Commission is make disciples of the nations. Like Ephesus, a multicultural city of old, we have ample opportunity to do so right here in the city. Melbourne is a mission hub for reaching every nation and tongue and tribe.
What a time to be alive and serving the risen Lord Jesus! May the renewed interest in church-focused mission not be a temporary trend but a long-term, prayerful, gospel-centred, biblical strategy to see God’s kingdom grow from strength to strength.
This article was originally posted on Murray’s Substack.
