3D Church

A 3D printer can now build a very basic house in a matter of hours — an innovation that could be important in areas hit by natural disasters. Perhaps a 3D printer could build a church. Haggai, in our text, is concerned about the lack of progress concerning a place to worship.

When someone mentions 3D printing, what probably comes to mind is a desktop-sized printer that can produce small three-dimensional objects. Some of these objects are very useful. 3D printers can turn out anything from auto parts to acoustic guitars to camera lenses to prosthetic limbs and much more.

But the technology is now being applied on a far larger scale. 3D-printing machines the size of a house can print prefabricated parts for full-sized houses — or even whole small houses — and can do so repeatedly and rapidly, with each one an exact replicate of the preceding one. Thus, 3D printing is now an industrial production technology.

The headline for one article about this large-scale printing reads, “This giant 3D printer can build 10 prefab homes in under 24 hours”! Granted, they aren’t huge homes, but 10 in 24 hours is remarkable. Just think how that could help provide shelters following a natural disaster, to say nothing of how it might eventually...