CHURCH AND CHURCH BUILDING

This study investigates what the church building means for the Catholic faithful of Pinang Parish, Tangerang (Archdiocese of Jakarta). Using semi-structured interviews with seventeen parishioners and a phenomenological thematic analysis, it adopts a phenomenologicalΓÇôtheological approach to interpret how the building is lived within everyday faith. Five themes emerged: identity, communion, stability, sacredness, and fulfillment. Participants describe the new church as making the community public and recognizable (ΓÇ£now we can point and say, this is our churchΓÇ¥), gathering ministries into a stable locus for fellowship and service, and relieving the insecurity of rotating or provisional worship spaces. They also speak of an atmosphere that disposes reverence and of a sense of arrival after a long struggle for official permission to build. WallenfangΓÇÖs notion of paradox clarifies this experience: the church is held together as a concrete structure and as a sacramental signΓÇövisible and fragile, yet experienced as mediating GodΓÇÖs dwelling that exceeds visibility. For a minority community, the building thus embodies perseverance and joy while reconfiguring how the faithful understand themselves as Church. The study advances ecclesiological reflection on sacred architecture by offering a bottom-up account of how lay experience and contested building processes shape ecclesial self-understanding, with relevance to wider debates on disputed worship spaces in minority contexts.