People who don't live in Columbia -- even those who live elsewhere in Howard County -- might well scratch their heads when they hear of a controversy over a church that wants to put a cross on the outside of its new building in Wilde Lake. After all, that's what Christians do just about everywhere else they practice their faith openly in significant numbers.

But in Columbia, it's a little more complicated than that.

Anyone who's seen the lights from the Dobbin shopping centers and thought Columbians had abandoned their novel ideas about signage, or noticed the emergence of single-congregation religious structures in Columbia and thought its peculiarly militant form of ecumenism had died out, recently found out otherwise.

The revelation came when a simple architectural proposal turned into a local cause celebre that threw ideas about the First Amendment, community standards, religious tolerance, property rights and aesthetics all into the washing machine of public opinion and let them rattle around like a pair of old Keds.

The proposal came from St. John the Evangelist United Methodist Church, which currently shares the Wilde Lake Interfaith Center with St. John the Evangelist Roman Catholic Church, but wants to move to its own separate building because the two no longer fit comfortably together in the center. The two congregations would still form an interfaith center of a sort, as the new building would be right next door.

But under a plan that was hotly debated and ultimately approved, the new building will include a 16-foot cross on the side facing Twin Rivers Road. The argument has continued on the letters page of this newspaper.

Exterior religious symbols have been more or less taboo at Columbia's interfaith centers from their inception as laboratories of cooperation between people of different faiths. The St. John's plan, the objection goes, tears at the interfaith ideal that is woven into the fabric of Columbia, integral to founder James Rouse's intent to create a place where no race, religion or social class would dominate others.

As Wilde Lake Village Board member Mary Pivar put it, the new cross would be a "stop sign to diversity and inclusiveness."

Many would pooh-pooh this sentiment as "political correctness," a term that's an intellectually lazy (what's politics got to do with it?) and snide bit of shorthand we much too often use to dismiss those who seek respect for different cultures and ideas, which is the beginning of peace. Pivar's concern has merit and we shouldn't dismiss it so easily.

But respect does cut both ways and the majority culture deserves it, too. Symbolic expressions of faith form an essential rite in most religions, and in many Christian sects evangelism -- proclaiming your faith to the world -- is at the heart of religious practice.

The scarcity of religious symbols has long been a source of frustration among congregations -- and not all of them Christian -- that worship in interfaith centers. Without the trappings of faith, a space won't seem to some like a spiritual home.

Such are the sacrifices made to the concept of the interfaith center, where multiple congregations with divergent theologies share space for the sake of both bridge-building and practical economics. How successful the centers have been on either count depends on whom you ask. In any case, a re-examination of the concept might be in order.

With a perhaps radical facelift for the Wilde Lake Village Center on the horizon, its interfaith center could well be the template for the future of the others, whether that means a revitalization of the concept or its abandonment. Indeed, as the redevelopment of Town Center -- and, eventually, the other older villages -- looms, the public discourse ought to include the thoughts of many regarding Columbia's religious structures.

Envisioning Columbia's big picture without a healthy dialogue about what's wrong and right with the interfaith centers individually and as a concept would be a leap of faith we should not take.

E-mail Doug Miller at dmiller@patuxent.com.

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