Thesis 8: the Wasteful Tapestry

Being a member of a fairly large blood and in-law family means I get to visit a good number of different churches on a regular basis. Thank God Google has worked in all of them! (It’s truly depressing how little you learn from the well-paid idiots on the pulpit, most of whom are either blindly clueless or willfully twisting the gospel to meet their own aims. I’ll dive more deeply into the anti-Christian idiocy of single-person-led Churches in another thesis.)

This past Easter, I found myself in an in-law’s church, one of those massive buildings that really wants to — but can’t quite — be bigger than it is (#WannabeMegaChurch™). To wit: seating for at least a thousand, massive sound and lighting setup, and a dais/altar large enough to host a Taylor Swift show. Just waiting for more people so they can do the services on repeat and bring in the sheep wholesale, the holy grail (or #ChurchWetDream) of Church investors.

There was, of course, a massive, tastefully rustic cross pinioned to the wall above the dais, and on either side, stretching from floor to ceiling (notably taller than said cross), two gargantuan seasonal tapestries constructed of purple velvet and decorated with mosaic imagery and gold trim. The front of the church was about 90’ wide and the ceiling at least 45’ high: the cross was about 30’ high and each tapestry about 5’ wide and 40’ high.

So that’s 80’ of heavy velvet, or 26.7 yards. On Amazon, quality Velour fabric goes for an average of $20/yd, so that 26.7 yds cost more than $500. Add in the cost of cloth to back the velvet for rigidity and the specialty mosaic fabric and sturdy thread to bind it all together, and that easily pushes the cost well past $600. Multiplied by seven liturgical seasons, and this one church is dropping more than four grand just to add some colour to the front of the church.

(I was really naïve about these costs, especially if the banners are professionally done. See my update at the end of the post.)

There’s also the time invested in the process, the uncountable labour-hours that get eaten up in the process, the math of which isn’t as easy as that of velvet and trim. However, we don’t need a calculator to know that good art takes heaps of time, regardless of whether it’s tapestries or crosses or stained glass or ceiling frescoes.

Now, for the record, I believe in art and making the world more beautiful with our creations, so this is no dig against the artists who labour and love their craft. Art is essential to humaning: if you can visit Rome and the Vatican and not be moved by the incredible wealth of artistry on display you have no soul.

What this example does is highlight how wasteful the human urge to beautify our spaces is when that space itself is wasteful. Given that the Bible never once calls Christ-followers to gather in obscenely expensive and stationary buildings (quite the opposite — Google what tearing down temples in three days means), every effort we make to decorate those spaces is an affront to stewardship.

What the Bible does call us to is loving and feeding sheep and making disciples, and to dedicate and give everything we have to those aims (i.e. what it really means to take up that cross…no, not the faux-antique eyesores hanging over the altar). When we dedicate our finite resources to beautifying Church, we are gilding the gorgeous lily that is the great commission: in short, it’s beautiful all by itself, and needs no adornment from us.

Imagine for a moment what the world would look like if every dollar and moment Christians currently spend on themselves (and yes, Church is about and for us, not Christ) went towards our needy and marginalized neighbours. Imagine how much more we could do to love our neighbours towards Christ, which might have something to do with the very reason we’ve been placed on earth…

Imagine.

Update: click here to see how fucking naïve I was about the expenses a church can incur if they decide to pay for their hangings. I had no idea.

Keywords: the Wasteful Tapestry; Faith; Deconstruction; Religion; Christian; Christianity; Church; Sin; Corruption; Scandal; Bible; Abuse; God; Jesus; Stewardship