This essay begins by situating my understanding of worship and architecture in the context of the Jerusalem temple tradition and the New Testament understanding of God’s dwelling. I suggest that while God’s spirit dwells in living believers, there is still an important place for religious architecture as an aesthetic expression that facilitates worship. I explore this idea through the Roman Basilica form and Keble College chapel as historical examples of architecture that facilitate worship. Having looked at these two forms, I suggest that there is a symbiotic relationship between architectural expressions and the living groups that use them. This relationship is narrative-dependent, since it reflects the group’s beliefs, world views, and ethical convictions. Here I suggest that Christian architecture reveals the story of worshipping communities in the context of the wider narrative of God’s liberative Kingdom. As my main case-study, I examine the design of Jae Cha’s multi-purpose worshipping space in Urubo, Bolivia. I suggest that by creating a community space that responds to the needs of the vulnerable, Cha’s building illustrates and engages in worship as an expressive and liberating action. I conclude this essay by connecting these concepts to the public nature of worship, proposing that architecture both encourages worship in believers and serves as a physical invitation for people to participate in the account of Christ’s good news.
Considering the purpose of architecture in worship raises a question about the importance of buildings more generally. Christianity, as a historical religion, owes its roots to a tradition in which the earthly position of God was believed to be fixed and constant. In the context of the Old Testament, the cosmic symbolism attached to the temple was very much of its function as the dwelling place for God within the specificity of a special structure. As Gregory Beale puts it, the Old Testament temple ‘was the localized dwelling of God’s special revelatory presence on earth.’[1] The designs of the sacred temple might be considered aesthetic in so far as the blueprints make extensive use of light and darkness, space, and decoration, to create a place suitable for the presence of Yahweh. Michael Wyschogrod makes the point that ‘the architecture of the Temple and its contents demand a spatial thinking that stimulates the visual arts as nothing else does.’[2] While this earthly abode lacked a distinctly congregational dimension, there is no doubt that its aesthetic and physical form was ultimately concerned with facilitating worship. The temple, as Harold Turner notes, was the focal point of prayers, sacrifices, rituals, and other great seasonal festivities.[3]
But with the arrival of Jesus, the notion of the temple or any structure as fundamental to the revelation of God becomes problematic. In scripture, Christ indicates that he replaces the temple with something greater, namely, himself. The Gospel of John underscores this message when Christ tells us that he could rebuild the temple in three days. Here the Jews assume that he means the actual building, but he speaks of his body which would be destroyed and rebuilt in his coming death and resurrection.[4] The Pauline letters reinforce this theme with the further understanding that it is Christ with and through the church that becomes the dwelling place for God. In one of the clearest descriptions of the church as the temple, St. Paul writes in Ephesians that believers ‘are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.’[5] As Jennifer Bess notes, this new expression of dwelling functions ‘in the ways that the old understanding of the temple did, providing us with a center, being a microcosm of the world, a meeting point, and an immanent-transcendent presence.’[6] If it is not necessary to denote a singular holy place to find God, then architecture appears to become devalued. If you can find God in every believer, then you can find him wherever Christians reside, which implies that no building can be set apart and sacred. Now that the Spirit dwells in each of us, are buildings merely functional spaces that momentarily hold the true and living expression of the Church, the believers themselves?
The devaluing of physical space in favour of the living community substantially influenced the ways in which earliest Christians worshipped. As is well known, the earliest Christian believers gathered in homes, upper rooms, or outdoor spaces. This was partially due to the small size of the gatherings and the relative poverty of those present, but also because the domestic meeting setting was completely compatible with the emphasis on the Christ-centered group as the focal point of God’s presence. As Harold Turner notes, the earliest Christian communities employed ‘a major transformation in the interpretations and use of the temple form’ which led to the abandonment of a holy sanctuary ‘defined in terms of physical place.’[7] Nonetheless, by saying this I do not mean to completely denigrate the need for architecture in a fruitful vision of divine-human flourishing. The Gospel texts themselves remind us that Jesus, as the one who makes all things known, does so within particular earthly places. The bodily nature of the incarnation naturally takes up spatio-temporal dimensions, thus extending the action of God toward distinct locations and buildings. The Sermon on the Mount is a good example of this when we see a parallel between the Mount of Jesus’ sermon and Mount Sinai. Jesus, in this sense, goes up a mountain to act as the new Moses. Here the location functions more than just practically and is instead bound up with the event as part of the revelatory message.
How, then, might we reconcile a high view of architecture and place with a theology that affirms the indwelling of the Spirit in Christian believers? I want to suggest here that these two statements are not mutually exclusive if we see the role of the church building as an aesthetic symbol which mediates the grace and presence of God. As Francis Mannion puts it, ‘while liturgical architecture has an indisputably functional element, this functionality operates within a framework that is constitutively sacramental.’[8] This sacramental understanding is necessarily aesthetic because it affirms that buildings point to a divine reality within the specificity of material and artistic forms. Like other types of art, buildings are not sacred in themselves but rather express the moment in which they are directed towards God. This special nature of the building is therefore in some way derivative, as it is of all art, to the extent that it is consecrated by its appropriate use to reveal the action of God in creation. This understanding recognises that church buildings, as aesthetic objects, can through their materiality participate in the presence of Christ while denying that they singularly hold or contain his presence.
If we agree that church architecture as an aesthetic effort is intricately involved in the interactions of a worshipping community, then we need to demonstrate exactly how it conveys this significance. Perhaps our first intuition is to say that buildings are functional items that do not communicate. But buildings, like clothing, tools, and other art forms, have the potential to express ideas that cannot be contained in their instrumental function. Throughout history, architecture has served as a visible expression for the meaning of such things as religion, politics, and beauty. Take, for example, the way a large number of Egyptian temples are orientated according to the river Nile or in reference to solar and stellar targets.[9] As Juan Belmonte and Mosalam Shaltout note, these orientations ‘dominated by the Nile, and celestial landscape, dominated by the sun and the stars, would combine in order to permit the establishment of Ma’at, the Cosmic Order, on Earth.’[10] Buildings, in this way, become instruments by which feelings and thoughts are expressed. In the narrative they create, they tell us something about communities and the values which they hold important. As Nelson Goodman puts it, ‘a building, more than most works, alters our environment physically; but moreover, as a work of art it may, through various avenues of meaning, inform and reorganize our entire experience.’[11]
Affirming the important place of architecture in aesthetics will help us reflect on the architectural expressions that Christians have used to create meaning and facilitate worship. Style as the concrete manner in which the architectural type communicates does so in a variety of ways. Take, for example, the early Christian use and adaptation of the Roman basilica. The architecture here is an important means by which Christians prioritised certain aspects of worship over others. The basilicas were often oriented on an east-west axis, focusing the participant’s attention on the direction of the rising sun, and the central point of the eucharist celebration.[12] These aesthetic decisions heightened the experience of worship by visually expressing the journey towards the ultimate point of significance. As Jeanne Kilde observes, ‘the basilica is an architectural form designed to bring the worshipper to the sanctuary, the Christian equivalent of the holy of holies, not immediately upon entering the building, but after a significant journey.’[13] Upon entering the Christian basilica, ‘the long nave encourages worshippers to think about the significance of their approach to the chancel, to consider their spiritual situation as the physical distance decreases.’[14] Here the experience of worship has been guided and enriched by ideas encountered in architectural form.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that almost every church has given some attention to the way in which their building facilitates worship. Looking at the number of architectural styles used in the Christian tradition, we can identify a broad range of diversity. Here I am reminded of my time at Keble College, Oxford, and my experiences in its grand and ornate college chapel. Goodhart-Rendel once described Keble college chapel as ‘one of the three or four buildings in Oxford of most architectural importance.’[15] Its architect, William Butterfield, was a follower of the Oxford Movement and so influenced by Tractarian principles of neo-gothic revival. In the tracts, John Henry Newman had argued of the necessity that faith takes a material form which did justice to the revelation of Christ in the Church. For this reason, ‘all that is noble’ in ‘architecture’ is a ‘divine gift, a moral result, a spiritual work.’[16] Butterfield’s chapel does much to express this Catholicity of worship and an elevated conception of church architecture. Through dark and rich brickwork, carefully arranged furniture, and grandly proportioned space, the chapel cultivates a sense of divine mystery and awe which becomes central to the experience of worship. These expressions of architecture, carefully planned by Butterfield through lengthy exchanges and even disputes with college authorities, help draw you into the act of worship and thereby become a vital part of the act itself.
Figure 1: Keble College Chapel.
Hence, while we affirm that God does not have a set physical location, we can recognise that places built and planned for worship share his revelation and so become part of the act of worship. Aesthetic considerations such as space, colour and lighting, undeniably play a key role in these experiences. These forms communicate, strengthen, and encourage the spirit of God to move in believers in the context of the material and spatio-temporal. In spite of this, I still wish to maintain that these aspects of architectural design are not sacred in and of themselves, but rather, find meaning in their relationship with Christ and the worshipping community. Once built, buildings may influence community behaviour, but in the first instance, buildings are given their meaning by the intention and acts of those that design and use them. Meaning, in this sense, exists not just in the buildings themselves but in the relationships they share and facilitate. As Lindsay Jones puts it, ‘the locus of meaning resides neither in the building itself (a physical object) nor in the mind of the beholder (a human subject), but rather in the negotiation or the interactive relation that subsumes both building and beholder – in the ritual architectural event in which buildings and human participants alike are involved.’[17] While affirming that architectural expressions are analogical expressions of the divine, this understanding recognises that buildings are a part of the narrative of a living group and therefore intricately bound up in their story and way of life.
In saying this, I invite us to recognise that buildings are necessarily narrative-dependent in that they exist as part of the narratives of living communities and that we can only speak of these in the context of God’s historical action in space and time. As Jennifer Bess puts it, ‘the church building acts in such a way as to continue the tradition and narrative of the Christian community by surrounding the congregation with images and forms that tell a particular story.’[18] Without this narrative, all that exists is material forms detached from any expression of worship or particularity. Yet, once architecture becomes part of the identity of a worshipping group, it takes on an important role in constituting its character. Here aesthetics, ethics, and worship are intrinsically linked. For example, when a church chooses to place a baptismal pool in a central location, they express through this choice a high view of baptism. These decisions operate in such a way that they become morally significant and even instructive to individual members. To enter and worship in this space is to recognise the commitments codified in architectural form. Insofar as worship is a privileged place for expressing the values of the group, the physical building has become an important setting in which the narrative of the believers is both revealed and enforced. While the church building is in some ways reliant on the worshipping believers for its meaning, once erected, it begins to take on a special role in expressing the story of the church.
Community ethics and flourishing are therefore important elements of our architectural choices. This leads me to suggest that we should consider more carefully the architecture and design of our churches. Our expressions of worship involve constant engagement with our central stories, allowing us to live in ways that is consistent with them. If architecture contributes to these narratives, its task becomes not only a question of aesthetics but also a challenge about what kind of worshipping community we wish to be. The Christian conviction invites us to see the story of Jesus as central to our moral convictions. As Sallie McFague puts it, ‘for the Christian, the story of Jesus is the story par excellence.’[19] When we examine the biblical record, the story of God’s action in creation, we find that Jesus’ life is intricately tied up in the task of redemption and liberation. That is, that the history of scripture demonstrates that Christ is a God of deliverance and that his narrative consists of his actions and movements towards this end. Jesus’ exhortations for building the Kingdom of God tell us to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and invite our enemies to table fellowship. If architecture is a worshipful response to this narrative these considerations must influence the way we design and build our churches. As Elise Edwards puts it, ‘architecture is meant to serve people, to assist in the transformative work of establishing justice and promoting the empowerment of all peoples.’[20]
On this understanding, church architecture should be a concentrated expression of Christ-centred community ethics. When designing and using the tools of architecture, the narrative understanding invites us to use these buildings as an act of worship that furthers the Kingdom of God. As Bryan Bell notes, architecture has the potential to address ‘issues that seem beyond the impact of design or building, such as education, health, employment, self-empowerment, and cultural identity.’[21] Practically, how can we use church buildings to advance social justice? At this juncture, it is worth exploring a case study that reflects an architectural approach that places culture, justice and ecology at the core of its aesthetic method. I will do so by means of Jae Cha’s design for a church/community centre in Urubo, Bolivia. Jae Cha earned her architectural degree from the Yale University School of Architecture in 1999 and in 2000 she founded Light, a non-profit organisation devoted to building public spaces that ‘provide a physical foundation for economically diverse, self-supported, and self-guided communities.’[22] Cha sees her architectural work as an expression of worship which is ‘motivated by [her] own faith and love for God.’[23] When designing buildings, she seeks to create environments that promote collective empowerment, creativity, and the liberation that she has found in Jesus Christ.
In 2000, Cha was invited to design a place of worship for the small village of Urubo in the Santa Cruz region of Bolivia. The village is rural and home to about 150 families who mainly live in mud huts.[24] Despite its small size, Urubo had a vibrant Christian community that did not have a dedicated worship space or community centre. Cha noted that her design principle for the church came from 2 Corinthians 3:16: ‘now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.’ Cha invoked a participatory practice approach to architecture which involved the local community in the process of design. Barbara Wilson describes this approach as ‘practitioners work[ing] with community members to build their neighbourhood’s political and social capacity, empowering participants with the design tools needed to shape their surroundings.’[25] She spent time gaining an understanding of the people of Urubo and observed that for architecture to be significant in a developing community, ‘it needs to be responsive and responsible to local conditions and climate, capitalizing on existing resources for a community that is already in need.’ As a result of this, the project took special focus on the needs of women and children. Because the men of the village travelled away for work, it was the women and children who most needed a space for worship and community events.
Cha’s understanding of the social need and cultural importance of the building led her to design a multi-functional house of worship. As Cha notes, the building needed to demonstrate the ‘acceptance of anyone to participate freely in the space, regardless of background, lifestyle, attitude, or religion.’[26] With this in mind, the building was designed as a circular space, accessible and open on all sides. This open plan encourages the space to be used as circumstances require and is not limited by the furniture or fixed structures of traditional churches. This allows the village to use every square foot of the space for blessing the community. On any given day, they can use the building as a church, a medical centre, or a kindergarten. The openness and simplicity of the canvas creates a physical space in which the group can freely express itself. Hence, ‘the project is intended to emphasise independence over dependence, aiming to create public spaces offering direct routes to encourage the community to express its strength and vitality.’[27] The physical environment thus provides a framework which can be used and appropriated by people of all ages and capacities. The paradigmatic response to this architectural invitation is gathering and community. As Andrea Smimitch and Val Warke observe, ‘with its luminous wall surfaces lending the structure a sense of lightness and spirituality, the church at Urubo is a beacon of assembly and both the religious and civic nucleus of the village.’[28]
Figure 2: The Church at Urubo, Bolivia.
Cha’s architecture does a great job of reminding us that while church buildings are intended to express the story of the Kingdom of God, they also serve an important public function. As Mannion notes of church buildings, ‘to be authentic, the Christian presence in the world must be public.’[29] Christian architecture provides the community with a public center from which they are invited to understand their place in history and in community. Through its symbolic form and representation of the Kingdom of God, the literal building becomes a public expression of worship and of the presence of Christ in the community. As Michael Reardon notes, ‘since the symbols will stand for all to see’ a church is never an empty shell but ‘a symbolic work of art.’[30] Churches are never simply sites of ritualised worship, but are public witnesses to the story of their real and living community. The public nature of church architecture brings us back to the idea of aesthetics as an expression of narrative, only this time, a public expression and invitation to worship. When the church is the focal point of a community, it creates a physical opportunity for the church to share herself with others and invite them to join in her story. This use of buildings in the name of the good materialises the potential of positive outreach and the creation of wider community belonging.
Thus, as I hope this essay has shown, architecture has an often forgotten role to play in the worshipping life of the church. The aesthetic forms of church buildings serve to provide a tangible expression to the narrative life of the church congregation. While the active presence of God dwells in the living believers, the church building is the concrete expression in which they gather, and its forms facilitate communion with God. These aesthetic forms of architecture are necessarily narrative dependent because they reflect the concerns and values of the community that use them. This narrative is primarily the story of God’s unfolding Kingdom and our continued involvement in bringing about his salvation and liberation as the proper manifestations of our worship. With this in mind, the aesthetic forms of the church allow us an opportunity to participate in this unfolding Kingdom. By dedicating physical spaces to the pursuit of blessing others, we express on earth something of God’s redemptive liberation, shared with us through Christ. In doing so, the Church openly and physically communicates its commitment to the narrative of God and opens the door of participation for those who have not yet chosen the story of Christ as their own.
[1] Gregory Beale, The Temple and the Church’s Mission: A Biblical Theology of the Dwelling Place of God (Leicester: Apollos, 2005), 114.
[2] Michael Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith: Judaism as Corporeal Election (New York: Seabury Press, 1983), 247.
[3] Harold Turner. From Temple to Meeting House the Phenomenology and Theology of Places of Worship (The Hague: Mouton Publishers, 1979), 54.
[4] John 2:19.
[5] Ephesians 2:22
[6] Jennifer Bess, Building the church: the future of Catholic Church architecture in light of narrative virtue ethics and new urbanism (Graduate Theses and Dissertations: University of Dayton, 2003), 20.
[7] Turner, From Temple, 129.
[8] Francis Mannion, Masterworks of God: Essays in Liturgical Theory and Practice (Chicago, IL, Hillenbrand Books, 2004), 244.
[9] Juan Belmonte and Mosalam Shaltout, ‘Keeping Ma’at: An Astronomical Approach to the Orientation of the Temples in Ancient Egypt’, Advances in Space Research 46, no. 4 (2010): 538.
[10] Belmonte and Shaltout, Keeping Ma’at, 539.
[11] Nelson Goodman, ‘How Buildings Mean.’ Critical Inquiry 11, no. 4 (1985): 652.
[12] Jeanne Kilde, Sacred Power, Sacred Space: An Introduction to Christian Architecture and Worship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 48.
[13] Kilde, Sacred Power, 48.
[14] Kilde, Sacred Power, 48.
[15] Harry Goodhart-Rendel quoted in Nikolaus Pevsner and Jennifer Sherwood, Oxfordshire (London: Yale University Press, 2002), 228.
[16] John Henry Newman quoted by George Herring, ‘Devotional and Liturgical Renewal: Ritualism and Protestant Reaction’ in The Oxford Handbook of the Oxford Movement (Oxford: OUP, 2017), 2.
[17] Lindsay Jones, The Hermeneutics of Sacred Architecture: Experience, Interpretation, Comparison (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2000), 41.
[18] Bess, Building the church, 61.
[19] Sallie McFague, Speaking in Parables: A Study in Metaphor and Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975), 138-139.
[20] Elise Edwards, A Theological Vision of the Ethical Function of Architecture: A Study of Moral Agency in the Built Environment (PhD Thesis: Claremont Graduate University, 2013), 92.
[21] Bryan Bell, ‘Foreward’ in Sergio Palleroni, Studio at Large: Architecture in Service of Global Communities (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004), ix.
[22] Jae Cha quoted in Bryan Bell, Good Deeds, Good Design: Community Service through Architecture (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004), 184.
[23] Cha qtd by Bell, Good Deeds, 184.
[24] Cha qtd by Bell, Good Deeds, 184.
[25] Cha qtd by Bell, Good Deeds, 188.
[26] Cha qtd by Bell, Good Deeds, 184.
[27] ‘Jae Cha Church in Urubo Bolivia’, Floornature, Accessed December 01, 2020, https://www.floornature.com/jae-cha-church-in-urubo-bolivia-4012/.
[28] Andrea Simitch and Val Warke, The Language of Architecture: 26 Principles Every Architect Should Know (Beverly, MA: Rockport Publishers, 2014), 46-47.
[29] Francis Mannion, The Church and the City, First Things, Accessed December 01, 2020. http://firstthings.com/article/2000/02/the-church-and-the-city
[30] Michael Reardon, ‘Thoughts on the empty space and Brentwood Cathedral’, Church Building, The Magazine of Ecclesiastical Design, 24 , (1993): 6-7.
