West Port Experiment

We often say (and rightly so) that the church building is not the church.  After the advent of Christ, true worship was untethered to a sacred site.  And yet, while the structure of a Christian congregation possess no inherent sacredness, it is the theater where the drama of eternal things is played out.  Chalmers put it this way:

“What is to be done here may tell on the everlasting destiny not of ourselves only, but of our children’s children throughout many generations. We are sometimes told of the mighty doings which go on within the walls of an exchange, where the bargains that are made from week to week, the commercial transactions which are there settled bear on the state and fortune of whole classes of society—or within the walls of a university, where the lessons daily given are deposited in the minds of assembled youth, who, in the coming age are to fill the highest departments of public usefulness—or within the walls of a court-house where sentences are passed by which character, and property, and life, the dearest of all earthly interests are disposed of—or within the walls of a parliament. on whose votes and decisions hang the fate of nations and those great events which figure on the arena of this world’s large and visible history.  But to a man of larger vision, who has an eye and a comprehension for things still larger than these all that we have now spoken of is eclipsed and cast into the shade by the might and the magnificence of those doings which take place within the walls of a church and which concern a far sublimer history than that of nations, even the history of souls subsisting in immortal vigour after all the empires of earth shall have fallen; and on the high scale and reckoning of eternity, the annals of our entire species, from the creation of Adam to the day of judgment, shall appear like a tale that is told, or but a brief evolution in the progress of an administration that never ends. They are words of eternal life which are spoken here; and on your reception of these words it depends whether that life is to be laid hold of, or that life of blessedness and glory is to be forever forfeited. They are the seeds of an unfading vegetation which are falling abroad and being scattered here; and it will depend on the soil of your own hearts whether they shall germinate into the briers and thorns whose end is to be burned, or into trees of righteousness to be afterwards transplanted into the Paradise of God.”