I hadn’t been inside a church for three years. I’d seen no sanctuary, no cross on the wall behind the pulpit, no pews, no stained glass, no engraved communion table. For three years at Heritage Church in Aurora, Colorado, I led worship inside a box-well, actually an elementary school gymnasium.
Instead of ornate banners declaring truth about God, the walls of the “sanctuary” were lined with sports posters and exercise equipment. Four regulation basketball hoops hung above us, and volleyball poles congregated in a corner-symbols of a competing American religion. The orange, all-purpose carpet had enough out-of-bounds lines to play most any sport. The mercury-activated lights hummed as loud as a swarm of bees.
Yet my fate wasn’t unusual. Box churches are popping up all over-in gymnasiums, recreation centers, and storefronts. Heritage Church was in a building program, hoping one day to trade our box for a sanctuary. In the meantime, we had to face an important issue: Could we effectively worship while we waited in our hollow box?
We decided we could worship perfectly well where we were. And so can others. Worship can be spirited and meaningful in an empty storefront, as it is in a grand Gothic cathedral or a state-of-the-art worship center. It’s a matter of creativity within available limitations. Our solutions were simple, but they transformed our gymnasium into a worship center. Here’s what we did.
Establish a focal point
In a church building, a raised chancel provides a focal point for worship, directing attention not only toward God but also toward the leaders of worship. Like most smaller gymnasiums, however, ours lacked a built-in stage. So we had to improvise.
We discovered an inexpensive way to create a chancel area: build a backdrop. Since we set up and tore down everything each Sunday, the backdrop had to be lightweight, portable, and easily assembled. We constructed our backdrop of three, four-by-eight-foot sheets of prefabricated wooden lattice that we cut in half vertically. We placed one-by-two-inch borders around them and hinged all six pieces together to make a collapsible, eight-by-twelve-foot backdrop. We painted it white to make it stand out against the multicolored concrete walls.
A few well-placed silk plants at the corners of the background and around the piano and organ (a portable Yamaha) put on the finishing touches.
Sound and lights
Acoustics in a gymnasium always present a problem. Our loud orange carpet did sport one redeeming feature: it dampened some of the echo in our box. We also learned to place the speakers as high as possible in front of the chancel to reduce feedback. Although our sound board was simple, it did allow separate equalization for each channel, a must for effective sound control. A knowledgeable sound person, which we had, can counter environmental drawbacks.
In addition, the lights in the gym hung high in the ceiling and didn’t provide directional intensity. The faces of our pastor and worship leader tended to blend with the orange glow cast by the carpet. We tried floor spots but found they created distracting shadows, and their wiring and hardware were unsightly.
We found a solution. Remember the volleyball poles? One of them, placed at the back of the room, became our light tree. We mounted two 300-watt spotlights on top of the pole and pointed them toward the backdrop. That helped focus attention, and the lights also gave a warm glow to the faces up front.
Physical arrangements
A school can be a confusing place for visitors. Fortunately, ours had a prominent single entrance that was unlocked on Sunday mornings. From there, greeters directed people either into the gym for worship or to the visitor center, where we had maps and guides to give directions to the nursery, restrooms, and classrooms. Schools with unclear entrances would need signs to direct people.
How we arranged chairs made a remarkable difference. Most gyms and recreation centers are wider than they are deep. We could have used a short wall as the front of the sanctuary, but that would have put people in the back seventy-five feet from the chancel. Using one of the long walls as the front spread out the congregation and kept that distance to a minimum. In addition, using three sections of chairs and turning the two outside sections inward at a forty-five-degree angle, we could provide everyone with a direct view of the chancel.
Baptisms by immersion were precluded by our school setting. With a little scouting, however, we secured from a neighboring church the use of a baptistery on Sunday afternoons. Because the baptisms were special events held in a “real” church building, the novelty and significance of the services drew people even at the odd hour.
Slides for music
We wanted our people to experience worship as a community. One of the best ways to encourage this, we found, was to put the words of the hymns on overhead transparencies or slides. Instead of everyone sticking their noses in individual hymnbooks, every head was lifted and all eyes were focused forward. That helped us better experience our unity.
Fortunately, our gym had a screen that descended from the ceiling right at our chancel area, but a portable screen would have worked just as well. Using a Kodak projector, a zoom lens, and a remote-control changer, we projected the words on slides with scenic backgrounds. We had hymnals to supplement the singing, but most of our corporate singing was led with slides on the center screen.
These few accommodations worked to keep worship one of the grand essentials of our congregational life. We still eagerly anticipated that new building, but it wasn’t necessary for our worship vitality. With imagination, we simply couldn’t be boxed in.
-Chuck Stober
Bear Valley Baptist Church, Pecos Campus
Denver, Colorado
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