Helping or hindering worship?

I grew up attending worship in a sanctuary built during the Great Depression. It replaced a building that burned down one Sabbath morning in mid-winter. It was a beautiful building constructed in difficult economic times. Obviously, the congregation thought beauty important. The excerpts below are from "12 Theses on Church Buildings":

• The church is not a building but a people, but the church is a people who must gather. Thus, for a church to exist, it must have a location to gather in. And since meeting outdoors limits the gathering (weather, sound, distractions, etc.), this usually means some kind of building. ....

• The health of a church is not necessarily connected with the quality of its building. A healthy, growing church can meet in a basement, and a dead, apostate church can gather (as many do) in ornate cathedrals. ....

• In the New Testament, churches would sometimes meet in someone’s home (Rom 16:5), and sometimes in larger facilities, like the Hall of Tyrannus (Acts 19:9-10). The church in Jerusalem (prior to the martyrdom of Stephen) was in the thousands and so gathered regularly in the Temple court (Acts 2:41-47).

• As Christianity began to grow, churches began constructing buildings devoted exclusively to their church gatherings. ....

• Evangelicals tend to not think much about a church’s architecture and aesthetic beyond purely functional questions. It may be tempting for evangelicals to roll their eyes at Christians of yesteryear who invested enormous sums of money in making stone cathedrals: Why was this not sold for 300 denarii and given to the poor? But it is an extreme hermeneutic of suspicion to assume that every beautiful church was constructed through avarice and worldliness. (Disregard the fact that these same evangelicals may not think twice about their church spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on A/V equipment)....

• You will find it easier to contemplate the glory of God standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon than you will in the fluorescently-lit DMV. It isn’t because God is more present at the Grand Canyon, but it is because we are creatures who are easily affected by our surroundings. The ornate and costly designs of the Tabernacle and Temple were not to draw God to the location, like iron-filings to a magnet. They were there to help draw the attention of the worshipper up as he approached the fearful, awesome, beautiful God. The gold, the designs, the sheer size of the structure—all were used as aids in helping the worshipper discern the holiness and beauty of the God he had come to worship. Thus, our surroundings can either aid, or hinder, our worship.

• A church should create a space for corporate worship that emphasizes—rather than detracts from—the central point of worship: God. .... The goal should be that when a guest or congregant walks into the sanctuary they realize that they have entered a place unlike any other space in the hustle and bustle of normal life. They have come somewhere that leads them to reverent silence and contemplation as they prepare to commune with the living God (Eccl 5:1-7). .... (more)

Marc Sims, "12 Theses on Church Buildings," Mere Orthodoxy, Jan 28, 2026.