We continued our discussion of Stanley Hauerwas’s essay, “Discipleship as a Craft, Church as a Disciplined Community.” We picked up discovering his preference for brick buildings over glass buildings. Sure, he’s from a family of brick layers and he’s using the analogy of bricklaying to talk about discipleship, but here he’s critiquing modern liberalism – at least one form of modern liberalism that was in view when he wrote in 1991.

The glass building works as part of his argument against liberalism in two ways. First, he claims that building such buildings takes less skill than building brick buildings. I don’t know enough about construction trades to judge this claim. Second, a primary purpose in building a building conceived as “multipurpose” (need this be the same thing as a glass building?) shows lack of commitment to the authority present in tradition constituted crafts like bricklaying. I wasn’t willing to go that far with him. We did note that in our experience temporary buildings are common. When a church building gets to 40-50 years old we begin to think it obsolete. It might be obsolete in terms of construction: air conditioning, access, and energy usage that might have been deemed adequate when built, might not be cost effective to renovate now. The church building might also be obsolete in terms of location.

More important in our discussion was the role of mastery in a discipline/craft. When I become an apprentice I attach myself to someone who know and understands more than I do, but also one who has the know how to do the work. The authority of the master is not primarily a matter of power or tenure. It is not a solo act. The authority of the master comes from the master’s long submission to the discipline and the community that embodies it.