Houses Built on Sand
Springfield, Colorado
2011
I don’t remember a lot of specifics about bible stories from all those Sunday School classes I attended as a kid, but this just seems like a metaphorically inappropriate name for a Christian church–it kind of sends the wrong message.
It does seem a bit incongruous. I guess the only “saving grace” is the church doesn’t seem to be built by a river, which is how I always envisioned this parable. Not that that eliminates the idea of a church built on a weak foundation, which the name of this one exudes.
You got to wonder where the background to the name of this church is from. I’m also kind of curious how you stumbled across this church, on the map this church looks like it is definitely off the beaten path.
Just as a refresher here is the NIV version of the Biblical story
Matthew 7:24-27
The Wise and Foolish Builders
24 “Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. 25 The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. 26 But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. 27 The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.”
The church was pretty much off the beaten path and I came across it because that’s where I was heading–off the beaten path–to a small canyon in the Apache National Grassland south of there. I assume the church took it’s name from a common reference for the local agricultural area as I saw another sign for a Sandy Soil irrigation district or something like that. But even knowing that, you have to wonder what were they thinking when they took on that name for the church.
My fifty-plus year old memory of the parable placed the houses by the ocean, one on the beach and one on the rocks above. Doesn’t quite match the story as you quoted but I guess the idea is the same.
I agree that the name is a bit incongruous, too. Quite funny, really.
However, if I were to give them a charitable interpretation, maybe I could argue that they are a church that is very “self-aware”, and recognize that any human institution is fallible and finite – metaphorically built on sandy soil, such that any attempt to ‘hear these words and put them into practice’ inevitably gets twisted in the reinterpretation. Maybe they realize that no human institution can really be built on rock (though perhaps we should always strive to do so), and that with this realization they temper what they say publicly and to their members regarding right and wrong, morality, and the like.
That would be some church, I think. Unitarian, perhaps?
Jeffry, your interpretation might work for a Unitarian church, but not for something like the Church of Christ I don’t imagine. At least it seems to me that most mainstream churches, although their doctrines vary from each other, take a much stricter form of interpretation of the Bible, i.e., don’t allow room for that much doubt or uncertainty.