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This Week:
- Resonance: Sacred Spaces
- Places & Culture
- City Scene: St. Paul
- Weekly Digest
Relevant articles and reflections on William Westfall's "How Should a Church Look?" in B&C:
My first glimpse inside Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago came in the 1997 movie My Best Friend's Wedding, in the scene where Cameron Diaz races down the center aisle to congratulate the supposedly engaged Julia Roberts, her squeals echoing throughout the venerable church's sanctuary. Talk about church becoming theatre, as Jeanne Halgren Kilde does in a book reviewed by William Westfall in the September/October issue of B&C.
Now that my wife and I have begun regularly attending Fourth, I have taken a more deliberate interest in studying the physical space that encompasses our Sunday morning worship. Until I took the building tour and picked up the church's brochure about its architecture, I remained, as do most worshipers, largely oblivious to the symbolism of its physical features (which I discuss here at my Chicago scrapbook).
Fourth is not only an essential outpost of the gospel to the proximate Cabrini-Green housing projects, it is also welcome respite from the commercial onslaught of Michigan Avenue, onto which its doors open. The church was built in the 1920s on unwanted real estate across from an open field; now the malls and high-rises of the "Magnificent Mile" bear down on it from all sides. So its interior is a place to ponder the immaterial amid the siren calls of materialism.
Still, I wonder if Fourth itself is becoming something to look at, another stop for tourists traversing its mall-lined block. Such is the fate of any site of a Hollywood movie, especially in Chicago, with its inferiority complex over film fame. Add to that the anonymity that comes with a church that size (and its high proportion of visitors each week), and soon the magnificent building and its historic institution detract attention from the task of forming a community of believers. And so I get queasy when the architecture brochure I picked up digresses from the intricate theological symbolism of the neo-Gothic church and starts talking about how the family of Cyrus McCormick, the inventor of the reaper and co-founder of Fourth's predecessor, endowed the east window—like a tribute to an historic social club.
In an essay reprinted recently in First Things, Duncan Stroik, editor of the journal Sacred Architecture, warns of the extreme end of this worship of buildings, as he laments that many of the grandest cathedrals in Italy are charging visitors admission fees. This is in the interest of preservation more than profit, but even so, Stroik says, "it also means that fourteen of the major churches including the Frari and the Redentore are entrance by admission only." As a result, the churches are "not really serving their highest purpose: the praise of God and the bestowal of grace on [humans]," and are missing "an opportunity to be hospitable, to welcome the saint, the sinner, and the prodigal." He calls this "pay-per-view religion."
In America, where church membership is higher and church buildings better maintained, this danger is more remote. Still, this tension between being in awe of our worship spaces and letting them enhance our awe of whom we worship tugs throughout Westfall's review. How do we sharpen our "reading [of] architectural space," as Westfall says, but stop short of projecting our adulation onto the buildings themselves? How fitting that Westfall's essay appeared in a cover package that led off with John Witvliet's essay on worship and discernment.
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