Church building

Church Building The church building in the village in Olney.
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A church building (or simply church) is a building used in Christian worship. Although the Church (the people that belong to Jesus) can meet anywhere, they have since early times built buildings specifically for worshipping God in. There are many well known church buildings around the world such as St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. A common architecture for churches is a building in the shape of a cross, often with a dome or other large vaulted space in the interior to represent or draw attention to the heavens.

History of church buildings

The first Christians were, like Jesus, Jews resident in Israel who worshiped on occasion in the Temple in Jerusalem and weekly in local synagogues.

Following the inclusion of non-Jews (Gentiles) into the church and later the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in AD 70, Christianity and Judaism increasingly parted ways.

Many of these early Christians met in homes, sometimes called house-churches.

As the number of Christians grew during, numbers became too large to meet in houses, and congregations began to build or acquire buildings that were specifically for Christian worship. A number of pagan temples were converted into churches, especially following the adoption of Christianity as the state religion by the Roman Empire in the fourth century. A famous example of this is the Pantheon in Rome, once used for a temple to pagan gods, it was later used as a church (it is now only a tourist attraction).

Photos of churches

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  The main church in Echmiadzin, the physical centre of the Armenian Orthodox Church

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  The door of the famous church in Wittenburg where Martin Luther is thought to have nailed his 95 Theses to the door

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  The church in Olney where John Newton, author of the hymn Amazing Grace worked

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  Stanford Memorial Church in California

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  A small local church, Trinity Baptist Church in Adelaide, Australia, once known as the "City of Churches"

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  The Église Collégiale Sainte Marthe in Tarascon, France

Links

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