“Church walls”—useful or useless?

B Hodge

So there is a belief system floating around in many churches that is held with fervor almost at a level of gospel truth.  This belief system permeates several aspects and questioning it may lead to “subtle opposition” or  “outright silencing”.

The issue is church walls.  What? You might be thinking?  I first experienced this about a score ago (20 years ago). I didn’t realize it at the time. But over the years, I experienced it several times. Now it has happened twice within the last two years and it hit me like a ton of bricks.

Church walls—my first scolding

Have you even been to a school and looked in the classrooms?  Teachers have decorated it with teaching tools, from A,B,C’s and 1,2,3’s in kindergarten to periodic tables and math facts at higher levels. These items are to stimulate learning and growth in the subjects being taught. Visual learning is impactful to students retaining teaching points and course material.

I was at a church many years ago and I was running a course on apologetics to youth (13-20 year olds). I used one of the classrooms for one day during the middle of the week for several months. We had a blast and learned to be discerning about tough subjects whether history, archaeology, science, world religions, and so on. I had a number of posters that really helped drive home points and they were visually appealing.

I recall the pastor telling me right after we started, that I can use them in the class, but as soon as it was done, I needed to pack them up and take them home. I did this every time, with one exception. One day I forgot to pack them up and a few of the posters stayed up in the classroom at the church for following Sunday.

After Church, I was reminded that I was supposed to take those posters down. I apologized and took them down right away, but it was too late the “damage” was done. The adult Sunday School class had already met in there (this is how the news travelled back to the pastor). I felt pretty bad about it.

The next week I had a few people from the adult Sunday School ask me where my posters went. I said, “I was sorry about that.” They said, “sorry for what!” That was one the of the best classes they had. They analyzed the posters and enjoyed learning about the Triune God (one of the posters that had been left hanging) and other topics that were presented in the posters.

I had to tell them that I wasn’t supposed to leave that stuff hanging on the wall. They were saddened to hear that, since they loved seeing it. I always wondered why I couldn’t just put the posters up and leave them since there was all that blank space left in each of the big classrooms with a large empty white board too.

The eerie blank space

Over the years, I moved and attended a variety of churches. I often found myself sitting in blank room after blank room. Whether an adult class, Sunday School, or other special meeting. I even ran another class at one stage, but I was told not to use the walls.  I automatically knew that rule since it had been engrained in me 15 years earlier.

As I look back on my class time as a student (when submitting to other teachers) in the eerie classrooms, I realized that I learned very little. I often gazed off into space and found it difficult to maintain my concentration, especially when the course material was dull, unengaging, and shallow. If or when I saw a permanent picture affixed to a wall it was not for teaching, but merely a single piece of art (like a vague flower painting) or if we were really lucky, there might be a picture map of Israel.

Church walls and the “Ah-Ha” moment

I was involved in helping a  startup Christian school get off the ground. The first year we rented space from a very large church that had plenty of classrooms that sat dark for all but 1-2 hours per week. But the rule was…”nothing on the walls” for those two hours per week.

It was an incredible hassle since every teaching item and every desk and any trace of the school needed to be removed from the classroom every Wednesday and Friday to give the rooms a “church feel”. School officials and teachers were all in the thick of this heated discussion. It wasn’t pretty. This was done for a year.

Then the school moved to another church that had an entire floor that was essentially unused, without heat or A/C. We rented it and fixed it up. But then, the pastor said that  they now wanted to use most of the space and insisted that the school not put things on the walls.

Again this was a heated discussion. Our teachers were told they would be able to use this walls at this facility (without having to take things down twice a week) and we were going to make sure it happened. In the heat of this discussion, I recall the pastor saying something that resonated with me. He said, “but we need to the walls to be church walls”.

At that moment, 20 years of history came to life.  What is a church wall?  Where did this idea come from that a wall in a church must be dull and blank like a mental institution or a prison—with largely gray walls too! Why was this idea so widespread?

Bare Walls Theory

Many years ago, a movement emerged called the Bare Walls Theory. It may go by other names like “Less is more” but those promoting it suggest it is a “learner-centered environment”. It works with kids with autism or Asperger’s syndrome for example. They get sensory overload with too much stimulation. So the mentality is to make the classroom blank on the walls so you can focus on the one teaching point in class.

But this concept is then applied universally presuming that everyone work this way. But I wholeheartedly disagree. There are people on the complete opposite end of the spectrum who thrive at learning with immense visual stimuli. I’m one of those examples. Put me in a room full of visual learning and I accelerate what I’m learning by association. Learning by Association or Associative Learning is a recognized classical conditioning method that even works with training animals to learn.

For the reader, I currently decorate my office with learning tools that fill nearly all of my space (except the places high in my office where the Fire Marshall won’t let me). I love it and I learn immensely in my office. So much so that I’ve written and edited nearly 30 books, about dozen DVDs, hundreds of chapters and articles and conducted hundreds of interviews. I love information at my fingertips and having it here, I learn it and retain it when I walk out of a room.

Consider the very concept of a field trip to stimulate the mind outside classroom. Stimulation is good, learning is good. I still recall the alphabet based on the rope-shaped design of it from when I was in kindergarten. Yet, I struggle to remember hardly any Sunday School lessons from blank classrooms over the course of the rest of my life.

Church walls with the blank, no life, no teaching, nothing stimulating-type of walls are one of the most undesirable environments in which to learn—contrary to the Bare Walls idea. When churches strive to teach basic concepts, the Gospel, or even a little meat, why do they couple the problem with blank walls. Even some basic apologetics posters (frame them nice) or Adam’s Wall Charts or the Big Book of History are excellent teaching resources to help teach the church, even if Sunday schools are letting people down.

Churches down through the ages used painting, stain glass, and many other visual things (e.g., Shield of the Trinity) to teach events, creeds, church doctrines, and history to the people in their churches. I may be bold here, but I suggest that this new idea of blankness is more of a reflection of the depth of a church rather than a good environments for teaching.

Is it too late to start teaching in our churches again?

I realized how engrained this Blank Walls belief is in many churches today. At the same time, I see churches withering and dying off because they are not training the next generation due to a lack of depth in Biblical teaching, no apologetics, and failing to teach them to deal with practical issues they face in our culture [like evolution, millions of years, big bang, missing links, and the trove of other things coming out of the religious humanistic worldview]. (Yes, that was a long sentence!)

If our walls were filled with teaching points, maybe, just maybe, our church member might walk out with something they learned that they could use, instead of staring off into blank space and imagine what’s for lunch. At least when they phase off, there would be a wall with teaching that they are gazing into to which they might learn.

Cite this article: B. Hodge, “Church walls”—useful or useless?, Biblical Authority Ministries, November 14, 2018, https://biblicalauthorityministries.wordpress.com/2018/11/14/church-walls-useful-or-useless/.