Written by Evan Bille Magen.
The Faith-Based Housing Initiative, where this article originally appeared, is a program of Southern Urbanism that trains faith-based organizations to build mission-based housing on their land.
Imagine someone who spends their day poring over old documents trying to find a new perspective to make a vision come alive. They constantly run into hurdles from authorities and fiercely compete with their colleagues. They devote their time to sketching out the vision and laying a foundation in the hope it will come together in the future.
I’m describing, of course, theologians. And housing developers. They share a lot in common, as it turns out. As faith-based housing becomes possible in more communities, we will see more interaction between these unlikely kindred spirits.
For the possibility of faith-based housing to become a reality on a church’s campus, a motley crew of clergy, parishioners, funders, and developers need a shared foundation.
We need a theology of building.
Most arguments for housing, particularly religious arguments, are ethical appeals.
They advocate for an ethic of building based on pre-existing theologies of loving our neighbor, Christian charity, social justice, or local mission. However, communities interested in faith-based housing based on these broad, ethical commitments ultimately build their houses on sand, to borrow from Jesus’s parable in Matthew 7:24-27. When the rains of raising capital descend and the flood of bureaucratic resistance comes, and the winds of congregational anxiety blow and beat upon the dream of housing, it will fall.
The long, complicated, and expensive process of building housing incentivizes churches to discern God’s call to do literally anything else. Churches will find every other possible way of loving their neighbor before developing their property. This is not to blame congregations. There are serious, if not insurmountable, legal and logistical hurdles to building housing. Congregations possess the rare combination of opportunity and perseverance to build, but I wonder if our current theology lets us off the hook.
The Church overall has a rich tradition of responding to poverty (if we follow it is another matter!), but poverty and shortages are two different but interrelated problems. Poverty is a demand-side phenomenon where people do not have enough income necessary for human flourishing. The solution is to increase income, whether through better-paying jobs, SNAP, or housing vouchers. In the case of poverty, the faithful response is to give (or redistribute, train, etc.).
But shortages are a supply-side issue:
Our community does not have enough capacity for humans to flourish within it. If we lack the units, the voucher is useless. The solution is to increase the supply of housing.
The faithful response to shortage, then, is to build.
Right now, a growing number of congregations are building in response to housing shortages in their communities. They have done so in spite of, not because of, a social theology that primes believers to address poverty, not shortage. In response to their communities’ cries and trusting in a God bigger than any theology, an increasing movement of churches are building their community’s capacity for flourishing by transforming their own campuses.
When theologian Walter Rauschenbusch wrote his groundbreaking Theology for the Social Gospel over a century ago, he began by saying, “We have a social Gospel. We need a systematic theology large enough to match it and vital enough to back it.”
Churches are already building.
We need a theology bold enough to meet them and deep enough to back them. A theology of building will help Christians find new meaning in the parts of church properties we tend to overlook. It will draw new insights from scriptures whose material details have been subordinate to the spiritual, as if they both cannot be sacred.
When we build as a response to God’s creative action, we learn more about ourselves and our Creator. It is in the learning and work of building that God draws us into relationship.
This theology of building is exemplified throughout scripture:
Throughout the Hebrew Bible, the Hebrew verb bara’, “to create,” appears 55 times. God created (bara’) the heavens and the earth. Only God bara’s. Humans never bara’. We were created (bara’)— emphasis on the passive voice.
Humanity is both creature and image-bearer of the Creator. Humanity does not create, but we are creative. We take what has been created, and from these finite materials, we build. The Hebrew verb banah, “to build,” is used in scripture when pre-existing pieces or raw materials become something new through the work of someone’s hope, vision, and skill. This is the essence of building. In contrast to bara’, God only banahs once— when God “fashioned” Eve from the pre-existing human’s side (tzela).
Building is fundamentally human.
When Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob wanted to give thanks to God, they built altars. Building is inseparable from blessing. Banah receives its most frequent use in the Hebrew scriptures regarding altars, but it is used elsewhere for building cities and houses. It is a conduit between God’s creative initiative and human response.
God creates, so that we might build. I offer this not as a comprehensive theology, but an invitation. The work of theology is constructive. We fashion meaning from the wideness of experiences, environments (built and natural), and relationships that God has given us. As Christians, our task is to develop these raw materials through the witness of scripture to God revealed in Jesus Christ.
This theology invites people of faith to start building. Do not wait for this theology and its ethic to build. Dream and draw what your church’s campus could be. Listen to the needs of your community from a supply-side perspective. Attend the property committee meeting as a spiritual practice. See Christ in who you might build for.
Build the theology that your community needs.
With gratitude to the God who creates, each action we take might move us toward a theology of building.
Evan Bille Magen lives in Durham, NC and serves as the Director of Missions and Community Outreach at the Kirk of Kildaire. He is a recent graduate of Union Presbyterian Seminary and candidate for ordination in the Presbyterian Church (PCUSA). You can find his Substack “Public Goods” here.
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