“You are to make the courtyard fro the tabernacle. Make hangings for the south side of the courtyard out of finely spun linen, 150 long on that side including twenty posts and twenty pronze bases, with silver hooks and silver bands for the posts. And so make hangings 150 feet long for the north side, including twenty posts and their twenty bronze bases, with silver hooks and silver bands for the posts. For the width of the courtyard, make hangings 75 feet long for the west side, including their ten posts and their ten bases. And for the width of the courtyard on the east side toward the sunrise, 75 feet, make hangings 22.5 feet long for one side of the gate, including their three posts and their three bases. And make hangings 22.5 feet long for the other side, including their three posts and their three bases. The gate of the courtyard is to have a 30-feet screen embroidered with blue, purple, and scarlet yard, and finely spun linen. It is to have four posts and their four bases. All the posts around the courtyard are to be banded with silver and have silver hooks and bronze bases. The courtyard is to be 150 feet long, 75 feet wide at each end, and 7.5 feet high, all of it made of finely spun linen. The bases of the posts are to be bronze. All the utensils of the tabernacle for every use and all its tent pegs as well as all the tent pegs of the courtyard are to be made of bronze.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Have you ever driven down a street everyone had forgotten? All the houses were run down or boarded up. Some of the street lights didn’t work. There was trash everywhere. You probably locked your doors and rolled up your windows. You definitely didn’t feel welcome. How about a brand new neighborhood? That’s usually a totally different experience. Everything looks new and clean and very inviting. It makes you want to live there. That, of course, is the point. The developer has a lot of money to make back, and if the whole place looks unappealing, that’s not going to happen very quickly. How something looks on the outside affects your mindset when you go inside. God understood that, and so He took care to give the people instructions to make sure the front yard of the Tabernacle was inviting. Let’s talk about the courtyard.

The courtyard of the tabernacle was a place all the Israelites were welcome. This is where the bronze altar was located. For most of the nation, this was as close as they were going to get to the presence of God. Only the priests who had been through the special purification rituals could safely enter the tabernacle itself. Because this was a common gathering place for the nation, it was large and open and airy. Being a bit further from the presence of God, its materials weren’t quite as fine or opulent as the actual tabernacle. The point was to create a space where the people could gather that would get them focused and ready for experiencing God’s presence. It was to be where they could come with repentant hearts to seek and find forgiveness from their sins from the one who was ultimately offended by them.

As far as descriptions go, this one is pretty dry. It’s very technical. And, that was on purpose. Moses was to be able to take these instructions back to the people so they could build the courtyard. What that does mean, though, is that we have to work a little bit harder today to figure out what, if anything, this all means for us.

Directly, it doesn’t mean much of anything. These were instructions for the Israelites to build a structure that doesn’t exist anymore and which we don’t need. And yet, every word of the Scriptures is breathed out by God and can be used by His Spirit to shape us more into the kind of people He made us to be. So, let’s give it just a little bit more thought than that.

One of the things we can see here (and throughout this whole section of the Exodus cycle) is God’s concern for His people to have a space that is specifically designed and intended for worship. Everything about it from its materials to its design to its construction was to prepare them to experience His presence. While we may not have a central temple anymore today because we don’t have need for one like they did, it is still a good and right thing for us as His church to have a space that is specifically designed and intended for worship.

Now, what exactly this looks like can and will vary. There are churches of every shape and size imaginable around the world today. Some are opulent and ornate. Others are little more than a gathering of people under the branches of a tree. Some have walls and amenities. Some are fortunate to have a roof. The shape and structure of a particular building doesn’t matter in terms of defining the gathering as a church because the church is the people, not the building.

Yet where the church body does have a building – and in my context most church bodies have buildings of some sort – care should be taken with regard to how that building is designed. And the design, both inside and out, should be centered around this question: how is this preparing people to experience the presence of God? Now, the presence of God is not reserved for a particular physical location. We’ve talked about that more than once recently. Today the presence of God is experienced through the lives of His gathered people. But how the space where that people are gathered can impact whether or not or how easily someone can experience God’s presence through them.

Churches, like houses, can become places with which we are very familiar. And when you become very familiar with a space, after a while, you stop seeing certain things. You become so used to them that they fairly well blend into the background. Anything in a space with which you are especially familiar can become a victim of this. What this means is that like our houses, our church buildings can acquire clutter and dust and even places in need of repair that members who are there all the time quit noticing after a while. The outside of the building can be similarly affected. Weeds, unmowed grass, untrimmed bushes, flaking and chipping paint, and so on and so forth can accumulate without anyone ever really noticing because they are so used to seeing them.

As much as we don’t see them, though, all of these things can still communicate. They can still send a message. And just like when you drive past a house that looks cluttered and run down on the outside you make assumptions about the people living in it, when people drive past a church that looks cluttered, unkempt, or otherwise rundown on the outside, they make assumptions about the members of that church and how they will likely treat guests.

Because of all of this, if you are a member of a church, and if you have been attending that church for a long time, there is a really good chance that you need to get some fresh eyes on your facilities. You may need help with that. You need to go through your campus in whatever form it happens to take, and take an inventory of the shape it is in. Do this on both the inside and the outside. Find the places where paint is chipping, where the carpets are dirty, where the light bulbs are out, where the weeds have gotten high, where the walls need new paint, where there are places in need of repair, where clutter is adding up, where you have old pianos sitting in random places, where it smells like an old church building, and so on. Make a list. Then, work to tackle that list. If you have the personnel in the church to tackle it, great. Use them. If you don’t, that’s fine too. Hire someone else who can do it for you. If funds are a challenge, don’t try to tackle the whole list at one time. Prioritize things by level of importance and cost, and work to check off one at a time. It may be that the process is going to require multiple years to complete.

None of this is going to be particularly easy. It is going to take getting out of your routines and seeing things through new eyes. It may be that you need to invite or even hire someone from the outside to come and do a campus review with you. Have them do a secret shopper type of visit and tell you the things they see that you probably don’t see anymore.

And, while you’re at it, given where our culture is today, your digital front porch matters as much as your physical one. As a church, you need to have a website or at least a Facebook page. These pages need to be actively maintained so they are always up to date. The website needs a modern, user-friendly design that is formatted for both computer screens and mobile screens. It needs to have your basic information about location and service times displayed prominently. Having pictures is good. Keep a collection of past sermons. Have some kind of a statement of belief so that people know what they’re walking into. (They want to make sure you aren’t going to break out the snakes at any point in the service.) Create a first-time guest page that walks a visitor through everything they need to know when they arrive for the first time. Include things like where to park, where the kids go, what they should wear, what the music will be like, how long the service will last, where the bathrooms are located, and the like. If you can’t think of enough things to add, go find someone off the street and ask them what they would want to know when walking into your church for worship for the first time and include that.

All of this seems like a lot of work and it can be. But it is also Gospel work. Doing these kinds of things will help that first time guest feel more comfortable and welcome. It will eliminate unnecessary barriers to their experiencing God’s presence through His people while they are there. For visitors who aren’t yet followers of Jesus, it will remove potential obstacles to productive Gospel conversations. As strange as it sounds to say, your willingness to do something like pulling some stray weeds out front of your facility could be the thing that allows someone else to enter into a relationship with Jesus. That makes it worth it.

One last thing. Here’s what the courtyard of the tabernacle might have looked like. Enjoy.