09-Miall on Buildings and Meetings

These two items – ‘buildings’ and ‘meetings’ – are
intertwined. Many believers simply cannot divorce the two.
Meetings are held in dedicated buildings; dedicated buildings
are devoted to meetings. So says Christendom. Miall dealt
with this fetish.
Miall spoke of the appalling ‘squeamishness’ (his word – I
would use veneration)1 which many believers have about
buildings or ‘sacred spaces’; or, as he put it, ‘buildings
appropriated to spiritual uses’. He was concerned, not only
about the wrongness of the practice – ‘superstitious’, he called
it – but the consequence; namely, that an emphasis on a
building actually gets in the way of reaching the lost:
There cannot be a doubt that there exists very widely, in
connection with this subject [that is, the emphasis on
buildings], an immense amount of superstitious feeling
[which is], in its influence, obstructive of religious effort.