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Hayes' term "sacred container" was still ringing in my ears as I sat down to hear the gregarious Mark Torgerson, professor of architecture and worship arts at Judson College in Elgin, Ill., speak on "Sixty Years of Change in Worship Space Design," armed with slides of a few sacred containers. If worship is to be seamless, it must be woven into its surroundings, and vice versa. Torgerson flashed a picture of the soaring Gothic interior of Manhattan's Riverside Church, next to a picture of a modest Quaker meeting room with wooden benches around a central table. How would prayers differ in each place? Would not worshipers address an awesome, majestic God in the first, and an immediate, incarnate God in the second? Today, church architects attempt to design shapes for both at once. Some of the most exotic results can be found in the hidden architectural haven of Columbus, Indiana—from the blank expression of Eliel Saarinen's boxy First Church of Christ to his son Eero's tent-like, intimate hexagon of North Christian Church.

Whole worship comes only from people seeking to be whole, said Steven Garber, Fellow at Calvin and the C.S. Lewis Institute in Washington, D.C. As readers of his book The Fabric of Faithfulness know, Garber is prone to quote Bernard of Clairvaux and Bono with the same earnestness. Garber began with a line from Donne: " 'Tis all in fragments." The Fall—and, more recently, the scattered and amorphous nature of modern life—has wrought the "fragmentation of human life," a maddening incoherence, Garber said. Restoring coherence requires "a seamlessness between worship, worldview, and way of life." There was that word again: seamlessness. Garber noted how Leslie Newbiggin's consummate chapter in The Gospel In A Pluralistic Society is entitled "The Congregation as Hermeneutic of The Gospel." The church tells and lives the story of "a coherent cosmos that was badly marred by the fall," and testifies to that story's completion. In the process, worship converts spectators of a ceremony into participants in a story. In an institution long known for liturgical stiffness, that message kept reverberating throughout the weekend like the beating of drums.

Nathan Bierma is an editorial assistant for Books&Culture magazine and a freelance research assistant for the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship.

Copyright © 2004 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

A Discerning Spirit by CICW director John Witvliet

Reformed, Reforming by Michael S. Horton

Books & Culture Corner appears every Monday. Earlier editions of Books & Culture Corner and Book of the Week include:

A Rose Among Thorns | A new novel by the author of Father Elijah illumines the spiritual consequences of our simplest decisions. (Jan. 26, 2004)

Baptized in Fire | A new book on Martin Luther King, Jr., emphasizes his spiritual transformation. (Jan. 19, 2004)

O'Connor v. the Antichrist (Jan. 12, 2004)

Moody, the Media, and the Birth of Modern Evangelism | A cautionary tale. (Jan. 05, 2004)

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February (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48