Jason Clark

Shopping Malls and Other Sacred Spaces: Putting God in Place, by Jon Pahl
£5.72 (UK), $13.59 (USA)

There is a lot of talk about space and places for doing church in a post-modern culture, pubs, clubs, cafe’s. Most of it intuitive, doing church in spaces people like to hang out in. People like Joe Myers in Search to Belong took us through the sociology of spaces that people connect in. But this book goes further with ‘Spatial Theology’.

Maybe if the modern church got carried away with the congregational/concert space, what new mistakes will we make, ending up as spatial fashion victims in a post-mdoern context. Maybe we need some theology, some understanding of space, that goes beyond the intuitive of what people like and don’t like. Pahls’ book is a wonderful look at this.

Pahl argues spaces are the ‘clothing of the divine’, and that we can either clothe spaces with the divine banally with whatever is trendy and fashionable or from within an understanding of God’s character, with the metaphors we find in the bible to describe God’s clothing and interactions in spaces.

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