Treat the Church House as Watched Ground

Somebody burns a church, and the town talks about it for a week. Then the insurance adjuster comes, the congregation moves into a school gymnasium or a funeral home chapel, and the rest of the county forgets. Ten years later there is a slab with weeds coming up through it. I have driven past more than one.

What strikes me is not the fires. Men have always been capable of arson. What strikes me is the shrug.

There was a time in this country when burning a house of worship put a man outside the community for good. Not because of the property value. Because of what the building was understood to be. You did not have to be a believer to know that the white building on the corner was set apart, and that setting fire to it put you in a different category from the man who torched a warehouse. That understanding is thinning out.

Nobody voted on this. There was no meeting where the country decided that a sanctuary is a structure with pews in it. The change was made on the media mountain, and it was made with ridicule, which Alinsky called man's most potent weapon precisely because it cannot be answered with argument. Churches turn up in films as haunted or hypocritical. In the news they turn up as a zoning fight or a tax argument. Rarely as the place where people are married and buried, where somebody's grandmother prayed for forty years in the same seat.

Chapter 7 names the technique plainly, because it runs the same way in every sphere. The reverence is stripped off the target before anything is done to the target. Mock a thing long enough and it becomes real estate in the public mind. Tell people it is only a building, and eventually somebody believes you and brings a can of gasoline.

So read these fires the way I read any campaign — message against meaning. The stated reasons vary case to case, and I am not going to pretend they all come from the same grievance. But the meaning is identical every time. The building did not stop them. It carried no weight. It was scenery.

The lock on a church door was never steel. It was the shared belief that the door meant something. That belief is what has been broken into.

This fight lives on the mountain of religion, and it is our own ground to keep. Here is where I part ways with most of the commentary. The answer is not a louder complaint. The answer is that congregations have to quit assuming the sanctity of the building does the guarding. It does not anymore. It has not for some time. We are keepers of a property the wider culture no longer treats as protected, and we ought to keep it accordingly.

Nehemiah rebuilt a wall with a trowel in one hand and a weapon in the other, and he did not consider that a failure of faith. "Nevertheless we made our prayer unto our God, and set a watch against them day and night, because of them" (Nehemiah 4:9). Prayer and a watch. Both. That verse has done more for practical church administration than most seminars I have sat through.

Practically, here is what watched ground looks like.

• Cameras that actually record at night, on a system somebody checks monthly. A dead camera is a decoration.
• A current keyholder list. Most churches I know have keys in circulation from members who moved away in the nineties.
• Exterior lighting on the sides and back, not only over the front doors. Fires start where nobody is looking.
• Brush, mulch piles, and trash containers moved away from the walls. Cheapest item on the list and the most ignored.
• A policy appraised at replacement cost and reviewed this year, not in 2009.
• Somebody who drives through the lot on Tuesday and Friday nights. A deacon, a retired man, anyone with a truck and a habit.

None of that costs what a new sound system costs. Most of it is attention rather than money.

I want to be careful here, because there is a way of talking about this that turns a congregation into a bunker, and that is its own kind of loss. The doors should still be unlocked on a Wednesday afternoon for the man who needs to sit down. A church that shuts itself against its neighborhood has already conceded something the arsonist never could.

But open is not unwatched. A farmer leaves his gate unlocked and still knows every vehicle that comes up the lane. That is the posture I am after.

So take one question to your next business meeting. Who holds a key to this building right now, and when did somebody last confirm the cameras record after dark?

Ask it that plainly. No accusation, no speech about the state of the nation attached. If the answer is that nobody knows, you have found your work. Keep the lights on, keep the list current, and hand the next generation a building rather than a slab.