Recently, in a cathedral, I heard a child ask his father a startlingly simple question: “What is the man on the cross doing there?”

It was one of those questions that can stop a theologian in their tracks.

The father had brought the child into a building filled with Christian signs, but the sign at its centre was no longer self-explanatory. A crucifix could be seen perfectly clearly and yet remain unreadable.

It reminded me of a story a friend’s mother told me some twenty years ago. She was in a jewellery shop when a young girl was choosing a cross.

The girl asked the assistant about the different kinds: there was the ordinary cross, and then there was the one “with the little man on it.”

She preferred that one because the decoration was better.

The crucified Christ had become decoration.

A cross as decoration

It is easy for Christians to respond indignantly to such stories. That would be a mistake. They tell us something important about the cultural moment in which churches now stand.

We have inherited buildings saturated with symbols whose grammar we can no longer assume is understandable or anything more than art or beautiful things.

And yet there is another side to this.

Young men who stay

Recently, I noticed several young men, perhaps in their twenties, sitting quietly in a cathedral. They were not behaving like tourists.

No phones held above their heads. No hurried circuit of the side chapels. No obvious attempt to “see” everything.

They were simply there.

Perhaps they were praying. Perhaps thinking. Perhaps they needed twenty minutes away from the noise outside. Perhaps they themselves could not have said precisely why they had come in.

But they stayed. That interests me.

A place to stop

We often worry that people no longer understand churches. Perhaps that is true. But understanding is not the only way a church communicates.

Before someone understands the crucifix, the altar, the tabernacle, the font or the strange choreography of the liturgy, there can be something more elementary: the experience of a place that permits you to stop.

Our cities provide endless places to buy, eat, travel, work, and be entertained. They provide remarkably few places where a person may simply be present without purchasing anything.

What churches offer now

Perhaps this is one contemporary purpose of the church building? Not to become less Christian so that everyone feels comfortable entering it, but to remain unmistakably what it is while allowing people who do not yet possess its language to enter.

The child asks, Who is that man?

The girl sees decoration. The young men simply sit.

None of them may understand the cathedral.

But all three have already begun to encounter its question.

• Dr Joe Grayland, a priest of the Catholic Diocese of Palmerston North, New Zealand, is a lecturer in the Department of Liturgy at the University of Wuerzburg (Germany).