Form over Function

Jarrett and Jeanne Stevens planted Soul City Church in Chicago. I recently ran across a post on their blog from August of ’09. The following quote grabbed my attention:

As we are in the process of building Soul City Church, the temptation is strong to focus on the aesthetic. To look cool. To sound cool. To be cool. To have a hip, eye-catching web site, to have creative names for ordinary things, to (for lack of a better word) – impress. These things may be important and they may attract people. But they will never, in and of themselves, keep people or transform people.

You can read the entire post HERE.

There’s a lot of chicken or egg discussion going on right now about this kind of thing. Many growing, thriving churches are aesthetically pleasing. Did the people get there because of the look/feel or did more people there provide more resources to improve these things?

How important is aesthetics to a church?