A Meeting Place
Three hundred eighty years after Roger Williams put everything on the line to stand for heartfelt worship and respect for conscience, we seem a bit building focused. When we talk of separation of church and state we often focus on which building an organization can meet in, e.g. can a church meet in a public school. There is a sad lament that churches in Europe are being repurposed rapidly as they are empty, but Roger Williams might have been happy, if there were houses with gatherings of the remnant of the faithful.
A visit to Rhode Island illuminates this misdirection in building focus. In a 1924 pamphlet distributed at his memorial in Newport called “The Life of John Clarke” the authors believed a meeting place was constructed, and then John Clarke chosen to lead the church that would meet there. Even so, in a 2015 tour of the John Clarke memorial I was told the original meeting place was most likely a house or a barn on John Clarke’s property, because there was not a Newport building used in common for church and state purposes. Hmmm.
Roger Williams would have said there is no true visible church on Earth today. If it is visible, it is flawed. Sometimes evil seems to hang on the doorsteps of the church — in one last attempt to dissuade those seeking Christ from entering beyond to faith. The best church in Roger Williams’s opinion was an informal small local church or a family based worship. There were many houses and barns used in the early years of the Baptist faith on both sides of the Atlantic but most frequently this was because they had to meet in secret as what they were doing was against the law. There was no stated objection to using a common building, if they had access to one.
Anne Hutchinson met in a church just before she was banished because her followers were too numerous for her ample home. While she wasn’t a Roger Williams fan, she caused the settlement of Aquidneck Island where Newport was the second settlement.
There is a movement for Fresh Expressions of church in this day that attempts once again to drop the pretense and tradition that buildings can amplify to get back to the roots of the Christian faith. In many senses the entire Baptist movement was once a Fresh Expression of the Anglican faith. Often Fresh Expressions meet outside the church in an attempt to escape the trappings of religion that are extraneous to faith. Sometimes they seem too focused on getting out of a building. Any building by definition has walls, limits, artificial boundaries.
Buildings require maintenance. At its best that maintenance is a chance for fellowship to keep the building a silent witness to the deep and abiding faith of our fore-bearers. Sometimes even when tax free property is involved, the maintenance can be a powerful distraction from worship and community service, financial and in time. At its worst the buildings are a mute witness to the separation of people into denominations and by race, encoding political and sinful separation in brick and mortar.Dr. J. Stanley Lemons, historian for the First Baptist Church in America, said in his talk on Founder’s Day 2015 that Roger Williams would have been against any sanction of state for church. Does the freedom from property tax constitute a sanction for church property that in fact distracts the church?
I do not believe Roger Williams would have recognized this need to have a separate physical place to meet between government and church meetings. Even though Providence did not have a building, they seemed to use same hill, alternating between civil affairs conducted by red leader or white, and worship for audiences red and white. Roger Williams was against sanction of state for any form of church, per Dr. J. Stanley Lemons. In other words, he would have required the going rules for any community gathering to apply if meeting in on public grounds.
Dr. Paul Hanson, pastor at Newport’s United Baptist Church located not far from the Community Baptist Church and other denominational churches in Newport, reminds us that “it is never about the building, it was never about the building”. It is about faithful hearts gathering.
