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In full view of drivers whizzing by on Interstate 75 near Atlanta, the Church of the Apostles is majestic, stately, and soaring. It's also daring: the building looks unmistakably and instantly like a church.

This decade-old neo-Gothic Anglican megachurch is layered with stone walls, a thick tower that hoists a cross, and half-oval windows in the shape universally known as "church window." While its original building plan called for theater seating—the sanctuary seats about 3,000—the church instead opted for pews.

"When we built it, there was a lot of movement towards the warehouse look, with black ceilings," says Dana Blackwood, Church of the Apostles' director of facilities. "The church leadership understood that that look was going to fade. People wanted to have a sense of tradition, something that looked like a church."

The Church of the Apostles suggests a new trend in church design, one in which some congregations are rejecting the slimmed-down, boxy buildings of the last half-century and embracing a look some would call antiquated, following the ancient-future dictum that old is the new new.

"The average person is not at all repelled by Gothic or Romanesque architecture," says Robert Jaeger, executive director of Partners for Sacred Places, a nondenominational nonprofit that preserves and renews historic church buildings in the U.S. "The average person finds the symbolism and the craftsmanship compelling, beautiful, and comforting."

"There's a desire out there to connect with something ancient, something transcendent," says Ed Stetzer, director of LifeWay Research and author of Lost and Found: The Younger Unchurched and the Churches That Reach Them. "There's a hunger to move beyond a bland evangelicalism into something with more historic roots."

Last year, a LifeWay survey commissioned by the Cornerstone Knowledge

Network found that unchurched adults prefer Gothic church buildings to utilitarian ones, challenging the conventional wisdom that medieval-looking churches feel out-of-touch and stuffy to seekers. LifeWay showed over 1,600 unchurched adults four pictures of church buildings, ranging from mall-like to Gothic. The majority preferred the most ornate church.

"The study probably tells us that the appearance of a traditional church might not be the turnoff that people assumed in the seeker age," Stetzer says.

Of course, Stetzer also notes that in North America and Europe, the congregations with the oldest buildings are the ones struggling the most to retain members. There's a difference between admiring a building from the street and going inside to connect with a congregation.

"Buildings don't reach people, people reach people," says Stetzer. "We can't tell from the survey if there's a connection between the two."

"I think we need to be cautious about an excessive focus on buildings," adds Gerardo Marti, a sociologist at Davidson University. Marti studied Los Angeles's innovative Mosaic community for his book A Mosaic of Believers: Diversity and Innovation in a Multiethnic Church. "These discussions [about architecture] often lead us away from a core insight: that ministry is about how we can actualize God's love through community."

Marti says that even in non-churchlike settings, most leaders carefully consider how the space can be set apart as sacred. He recalls Mosaic's decision in 1998 to move its Sunday evening service to a downtown nightclub.

 "When Mosaic first stepped into the nightclub, its leaders asked, 'Can we make this into a church?'"Marti recalls. "There was a lot of prayer about how to arrange the space so that it evoked worship. Even in the most boxlike space, every church leader I've talked to still asks, 'How do we make this a place of worship?'"

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May 2009, Vol. 53, No. 5, Page 36