We do it in the name of church growth, but it is really the betrayal of a sacred trust. It would be like turning St. Paul’s Cathedral into a shopping mall to increase traffic. But in the long run, when we sacrifice beauty and mystery for the sake of practicality, we paradoxically end up making it impractical. Think of all the abandoned strip malls that we no longer have any use for. That is the lesson: when we sacrifice the beautiful for the useful, we eventually end up with something entirely useless!