The Church Is Not a Museum. Why the Heavens Not?

“The church isn’t a museum…” is the genre of semi-inspirational quote whose origins are hard to conclusively pin down, attributed to everyone from St. Augustine—a boldly anachronistic claim—to your youth pastor—who definitely heard it somewhere else first.

I am a pastor, ordained 12 years now, in some sort of church ministry 20 years now, currently leading my small but fiercely persistent and disproportionately vocal fellowship, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Canada.

I still believing dressing up and being silly has pedagogical value.

But before that, from the summer job I got at sixteen through my undergraduate studies, I was solidly in the museum world attending church on Sundays, not in the church world going to museums on weekends. I worked longest for Plimoth Patuxet Museums, teaching colonial history in a 17th-century suit and dialect in thatched roof houses or aboard the Mayflower II. As that was a seasonal position, I also have worked for the Boston Museum of Science and the Peabody Essex Museum.

I did not begin university “on time” or in a traditional program. The first university course I ever took was a single course as a continuing education student while working full-time. Introduction to Museum Studies. That was the dream, the path, the hope. Imagine spending every day at a museum!

My eventual changed trajectory from museums to churches happened as I learned a painful truth: museum administrators’ careers eventually move away from the subject of the museum, whether it history or science or art, and into museum administration itself—fundraising and building repairs and human resources. I loved on-the-ground creative education and feared that to make a sustainable living, I would have to get promoted beyond that into a nonprofit manager. (Dear reader: the young man who changed majors with this revelation because surely church would be different has become a denominational leader. Lovingly laugh at him as much as necessary.)

However, I still love museums. My own college-age children caught on long ago they had a theme park parent and a museum parent; a roller coaster parent and a let’s learn how to turn wool into yarn parent. As a Massachusetts child, I legitimately thought Old Sturbridge Village was a better time than Six Flags, and as a Québécois parent I picked day trips to Village Québécois d’Antan over La Ronde without hypocrisy.

As a museum lover who works in the church, this anti-museum cliché irks me.

Because it fundamentally misunderstands museums.

And churches ought to have a curious empathy for misunderstood cultural institutions resisting decline. It’s in our own best interest.

Now, let’s be clear, some churches and some museums, are good at their missions. And some are terrible. Most are a very human mix. But I believe there are important things that we in church leadership can learn from museums at their best.

Museums Have to Teach Everyone

A thriving museum is crowded with people, from newborns to the elderly. They speak multiple first languages. Some people have never heard of the subject they teach until today. Some have doctorates in it. Some will visit today, only today, and all they will ever know is what they learn today. Some people will become members, visit weekly, turn into volunteers, or fall so in love with it they find a way to work there.

And a good museum knows that its jobs is to engage with all those people. To teach all those people.

That means a constant thoughtfulness about assuming no prior knowledge and making sure there is always something new to learn, or at least a deeper engagement with it.

“We have all heard this Bible story before,” is as silly to say in a sermon as, “We have all seen this painting before,” would be to say to a first time museum visitor. Yet, on the other hand, some people have heard it or seen it before. So a museum must both introduce and point out a new detail, summarize and offer a venue to go deep.

All Ages

The way churches and museums most strikingly are alike to me, I say with full bias as a longtime children’s minister is that they are rare institutions of all-ages learning together. A fight in religious life that has ebbed and flowed for the last century resolves around whether we specialize ministries for certain ages or if we do things “intergenerationally.” In church life, I shudder when I hear “intergenerational service” because I have too often seen it as a euphemism to make ignoring children’s pedagogical needs sound progressive. (I am sure this is not the case everywhere. I have just seen it mean this enough to be suspicious.)

Museums are not immune from this paradox and tension. Some of the best model the both/and solutions. While there are excellent children’s museums in their own right, some museums like the Canadian History Museum and Old Sturbridge Village have excellent dedicated children’s spaces. Those spaces, when well designed, are not in fact just for children, but engage parents and grandparents and accompanying older siblings in the play and the learning.

The Montréal Museum of Fine Arts often has creative activities “for children” where parents are invited to come along. We get to learn painting techniques in the social safety of “doing it with the kids.”

Another challenge is bridging the children’s outreach to the “grown-up” world. The Canadian National Gallery of Art had, at least when my kids were of the appropriate age, a phenomenal scavenger hunt where children could walk around in costumes or holding dolls or stuffed animals, finding the piece of art that they had become a part of, and pose with the painting or sculpture as they found it. Of course, once again, accompanying grown-ups then also become more attentive about the art, too.

In church life, we need to offer both/and, specifically doing things for specific ages, but also finding ways to blend ages. I have become a staunch believer that anything that is pedagogically good for kids is something adults outgrow less than we are told, that adults will also enjoy if given the safe excuse. Colouring sheets in the back corner of the sanctuary are nice, but why not a story-theme colouring sheet in every bulletin, allowing kids to stay in the pews with their family and while we ask them to sit and listen like adults, we also let the adults colour like the kids.

The One Time Visitor and the Lifetime Member Both Matter

Museums are sometimes global tourist attractions and local institutions. Frankly so are many churches! And they need to serve both populations. The first museum for which I worked, Plimoth Patuxet, had in our mission statement the commitment to create “powerful personal experiences of history.” At our best that meant ensuring that a one-time visit would still be memorable and educational and positive.

I have seen some churches see one-time visitors as failures to such an extreme that if you reveal to an usher you are an out-of-town tourist, their care about you obviously and immediately vanishes. I have also served in large downtown major city congregations that took for granted everyone in the back rows was a one-time visitor without judgment, but also without actually checking, sometimes ignoring the locals who also settled in the back and may have been looking for a church home.

If we focus on making sure everyone who walks through our doors has a “powerful personal experience,” and trust them to make their own choices about whether it was once in a lifetime or the first time in a changed lifetime, we would be more like museums. And better churches.

Multimodal learning

A cliché museum of the past was perhaps a silent walk-through, only looking. A cliché church of the present may be similarly passive, only listening. Both at their best allow for movement, exploring at one’s own pace, a mix of organized and independent experience, a mix of passive listening or watching and active doing. What I appreciate most about museums over churches in this regard is when both institutions manage to create such opportunities, museums tend to be clear that all these things are offered as options. You may touch. You may try to do this historical craft, you may attempt to paint in this style. Church liturgies and activities will involve a variety of listening, and speaking, and singing, maybe even crafting and eating! But is that all being offered with the freedom for people to connect how they most desire, or with an expectation that shy must share a fun fact about themself or the tone-deaf MUST sing?

Visiting, Giving, and Volunteering are all Good

Museums need visitors. Many folks erroneously assume museums exist for the preservation of historical artefacts. May I say from inside the museum world, absolutely not. Those are archives, you are thinking of. Letting people see the artefacts is an absolute logistical, preservation, and security nightmare. The best way to preserve most things is to hide it from people. I will get back to that.

Museums are distinct from archives—and admittedly these can be intertwined institutions—in that showing you is the point. The exact finances of each museum are going to vary wildly, but as a broad statement, even if you think of a museum as expensive, its daily admissions costs usually primarily recoup the cost of being open that day. Visitors do not fund the museum’s longterm sustainability in most cases. But they are a measurable sign that the mission is being fulfilled.

Donors, sometimes as memberships of frequently visiting locals through major donors, are also needed. Museums need people who give significant, even sacrificial, amounts. These are for obvious reasons disproportionately wealthy people, but more than you may imagine include people of more modest means for whom the museum itself is simply something they care deeply about.

Museums also depend, in most cases, on a fair amount of volunteer labour, people with time but not necessarily money, who lower the operating costs with their talents.

All are all needed in our churches.

I have often observed museums as being better than churches at accepting all these people—visitors, donors, and volunteers—on their own terms, and saying thank you. But churches often seem to envision them as step ladders, or a package deal, pressuring people too fast into too much. I do believe in attending, giving to, and helping out at my church. Yet I wonder if churches would do themselves a longterm favour by having the quiet confidence in our mission to simply thank people for what they attend, what they give, and how they help, without pressuring too much too fast.

Preservation and Passing On

At the root of the “church is not a museum” cliché is a healthy desire for churches not to be stagnant. This part of where I feel the cliché is terribly unfair to museums! My favourites are hardly stagnant places. At Plimoth Patuxet, my exhibit was a historical village presenting life as it was in 1627. What could be more stagnant than perpetually staying in the same year? Well, as it turns out, we modelled 17th-century farming and building techniques. Because no house was supposed to be more than 7 years old in our 1627 village, we constantly replaced them, and each rebuild represented more archeological evidence, more primary source research into techniques, more skills of the staff. As I started working there during puberty, I had to role play as a new person each summer, with a different religion and dialect.

The best way to keep everything the same is to keep people away, to lock it up, and turn off the lights. Rigid preservation, therefore, is also death.

Museums rotate art from climate controlled darkness to public view, constantly wrestling with the tensions between preservation and public display. Even as they show the same painting as they may have shown for centuries, they change the descriptions, they alter what they show it with.

Churches have a rich 2,000 year history of tradition. We disagree mightily with one another on how much to preserve and how much to change. We argue about being traditionalist or missional, or how to be both. Art museums have the same fights, albeit with different jargon. There are paradoxes of experts’ beliefs about excellence and popular accessibility. History museums, in particular, wrestle—as do old churches—with very literal arguments about historical preservation and actual, physical accessibility.

If we preserve nothing of the past, we have nothing to teach. If we are not sharing what we have, though, there is no point in its preservation.

Museums and churches face these similar questions. Church leaders would do well to visit a local excellent museum and ask how they are approaching the balance, and if there is anything to learn from their example.

Community Pride

A final point I want to offer is that each museum for which I have worked has had people who live nearby, who do not necessarily even visit much, who do not work there, who don’t donate, who are deeply proud that we were part of the community.

Sometime these included people who were apathetic about our central mission, but who enjoyed the prestige we offered the community, or the jobs on site, or the tourists who led to other jobs off-site. Sometimes they loved our buildings and had memories of great events and receptions and celebrations.

No museum hosting wedding receptions should mistake its central purpose for being a wedding reception venue. (Some do get so tempted.) But those outside events not only provide needed revenue, they build a wider network of attachment to the institution.

Churches that creatively invite their community into their space, including for the arts or a food bank or a scouts meeting or for AA or any number of things beyond traditional ministry strengthen their community and themselves. Is that missional? I think in the sense that our mission is to serve, yes, no matter what those served choose to do. Doing good is innately good.

In conclusion, the church is not a museum. I pray it would become more like one, because one thing that hasn’t changed since I was a kid is that I really love museums and church, but understand why some people don’t.