Christian Today have reported that construction has started on what is being described as the UK’s biggest Christian monument. They report:

the team behind the project met an initial £40 million fundraising target.

The Eternal Wall of Answered Prayer, to be built near Coleshill between the M6 and M42 motorways outside Birmingham.

It will stand at 51 metres tall – more than twice the height of the Angel of the North – in the shape of a Möbius strip. 

The monument will be made of one million bricks, each linked to a story of “answered prayer” that can be accessed via smartphones. Organisers said about 120,000 such stories have already been submitted from 125 countries.

I wonder what you make of that?

Personally, I look at £40 million and see it spent on a giant monument and my heart sinks. To put that in some sort of context, £40 million would keep 400 churches of our size fully funded for one year or could keep 40 of them fully funded for the next ten. But what have we chosen to spend £40 million on? One million bricks linked to stories of answered prayer. Without putting too fine a point on it, it doesn’t even link specifically to some sort of gospel message that might help move somebody a little closer to Jesus. And, if I’m being honest, I am not convinced a random, contextless gospel message is likely to do vast amounts evangelistically and I think there are lots of significantly cheaper ways of achieving that end.

I have a similar feeling about this kind of thing as JC Ryle, the first bishop of Liverpool, reportedly had when the construction of a cathedral for the city was mooted:

The Cathedral Act prescribed that the powers under the Act should be exercised before 1 June 1888, but no agreement could be reached; the Bishop warned that it would cost half a million pounds to build a new cathedral on the scale envisaged; the region was experiencing another period of trade depression, and the treasurer reported that the cathedral appeal had met with a lukewarm response. It was a disappointment to many in the city when the Act was allowed to lapse and the project postponed until a more opportune time. Sir William Forwood, a member of the cathedral committee, felt ‘the Bishop did not help the cause, for though he was anxious that a cathedral should be built he frequently explained his opinion, both in public and in private, that additional churches and mission halls could be more useful’.¹

All things being equal, Ryle was not opposed to a cathedral. Indeed, he was favourable to it. But in light of a depression and the severe poverty facing Liverpool, he was not in favour of it at the time. Moreover, given limited resources, he was repeatedly clear on the need to build more churches and mission halls for the sake of the gospel. This is precisely what he did.

In precisely the same way, I am not opposed to Christians wanting to do things that may have some value, even if it is not direct and overt evangelistic value. I am not a utilitarian who sees no value in anything other than that which is evidently useful and I think the things that draw people to Christ are more broad and varied than our particular presentations and the mere words of the gospel. Human hearts often need a bit more than an information download. All things being equal, I think beauty matters, cathedral buildings (of themselves) are not evil and even monuments that may attract visitors who then engage on some level are not necessarily ludicrous.

However, much like Ryle, I think there are other priorities at stake. Unlike Victorian Liverpool, the church is no longer awash with funds and resources must be considered. When I weigh the thought of £40 million on a monument outside Birmingham against the poverty of areas like Oldham, Rochdale, Blackpool and Burnley among others – places where there is often no accessible gospel preaching church for the poor – it is hard not to take the same view as Ryle: ‘additional churches and mission halls could be more useful’.

It staggers me that we can afford £40 million for a monument, but we can’t afford £100,000 to keep a church open for another year. We can raise funds for a prayer wall, but we can’t support churches and ministries that would keep pastors in the game, preaching the gospel in areas of greatest need, for a fraction of the amount. Forty separate churches could be fully funded for 10 years or 80 separate churches for five if we took that same amount of money and simply gave it to them. Even if we take an entirely pragmatic view, 80 churches with at least five years in the tank seem likely to have a better gospel impact that a giant mobius strip. It wouldn’t be eye-catching, it wouldn’t be a big monument that would attract thousands of visitors, it would be funding ordinary, local, plodding ministry whose results are not guaranteed. But it would be funding the vehicle that Jesus licensed for the gospel and it would be serving the building up of his people in the way he has called us to do.

Rather than building massive monuments, we should focus our funding on local churches and those ministries that actively serve local churches, whether training ministers for gospel ministry, serving ministers to keep them in gospel ministry or supporting missionaries sent by local churches to plant or serve in local churches. Just ask yourself this: if you had £40 million quid to use for the kingdom, would a giant mobius strip outside Birmingham be the way you would spend it? If we can raise £40 million for that, let us think more carefully about how we can support, encourage and build up local churches, gospel ministers and mission workers whose impact is not only more likely to serve the kingdom, but is Jesus’ prescribed vehicle for doing so.

1. Eric Russell, ‘Bishop JC Ryle’, Churchman, 113/3, 1999, p.6 accessed at https://www.churchsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Cman_113_3_Russell.pdf ↩︎