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Suburban sprawl, Bess contends, dissociates daily communal life from physical place. It is environmentally unsustainable and unjust; it makes people slaves to their cars. Usually it is also ugly; useful and mostly durable, yes, but architecturally unbearably dull.
Worst of all may be this: Christians keep blithely swimming along with modernist, anti-biblical assumptions about the built environment as if our public spaces, private buildings, and the shape of our cities didn't matter—as if they didn't affect our ability to live out the life of Christ, individually and communally. Bess fiercely begs to differ.
In doing so, of course, he joins a chorus. But there's a counternarrative to this account of "sprawl," an alternative story in which the circumstances deplored by Bess and his kindred spirits are seen in a very different light. It would be helpful, some other day, to hear Bess and these contrary voices in conversation. In the meantime, this stimulating book offers a blueprint for neighborly life that many readers will find deeply congenial—and one which describes not just my home life but also my church life. I am one of the rare creatures who get to work out the Gospel According to Bess in the best possible context: the walkable one.
On non-inclement days I can walk to my church in 13 minutes, bike it in five. Hope Chapel sits quietly in the middle of my neighborhood, a moderately sized non-denominational evangelical church whose architecture is, lo, theologically immanent.
This last fact I only know after reading Mark Torgerson's An Architecture of Immanence. In this book published in the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship Liturgical Studies series, Torgerson asserts: our "built realities can both shape theological understanding and unleash or restrict practice and ministry." No architecture—no building, no design—is ever neutral. And that style of church architecture which Hope Chapel shares with most of Western culture in the 20th century he calls "immanent." An immanent style is that which gives emphasis to the presence of God in the people gathered.
A simple way to tell the difference between immanent architecture and its opposite, transcendent architecture, is this: one is a House of the People God, the other is a House of God. In the one we give emphasis to the nearness of God, in the other to the transcendent holiness of God. Here is the house church, there is the Gothic cathedral. The history of church design then is a history of swaying back and forth between one and the other. The 20th century for its part represents a striking turn towards immanence.
Torgerson identifies three key movements that gave rise to this style: the ecumenical, the liturgical, and the modern architectural. With the first, the ecumenical movement, you have the creation of relational conduits through which ideas about church design could be swapped on both national and international levels, across denominations and traditions. Such cross-pollination created an unusually fertile environment for change.
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