Two of Mel McGowan’s earliest memories are bombs exploding in Saigon during the Vietnam War and then, a few months later, gazing at the lights of Main Street USA at Disneyland. The juxtaposition of those scenes was, in his words, the start of his “weird wiring.” McGowan was born to an American G.I. father and his Vietnamese wife near the end of the Vietnam War but was raised primarily in Germany. McGowan became a Christian in high school when his family moved to California. He then followed his best friend to film school with plans to influence the world through movies. But McGowan was soon drawn to architecture and urban planning courses.
After graduation he went to work for Disney designing a number of the entertainment company’s properties, including Downtown Disney. McGowan now serves as the president of Visioneering Studios, a leading design firm for churches and ministries. Rather than communicating through movies, he found his calling by communicating through sacred space.
Leadership’s Marshall Shelley and Brandon O’Brien met McGowan in Los Angeles, where he showed how sacred space reinforces and transmits a congregation’s values.
You believe churches need to think about facilities in new ways. Why?
Most church leaders—and even most architects—hold a false dichotomy about church buildings. One view is the high church model that tries to rebuild the Temple. They use ascension, whether with steps or ramps, and filtered light through stained glass, and other techniques to induce a sense of sacredness.
The opposing view is what seems like Quaker or Puritan asceticism, emphasizing functionality and thrift in church design. “We’re not spending anything on these facilities. We just need to keep the rain off our heads.”
And the problem with the functional approach is …
What I call “Midwestern multi-useless gymnatoriums.” Their primary purpose is to hold lots of people, and get them in and out quickly. If that’s all you want, then a big aluminum building is all you need.
But the purpose of sacred space is to lift the spirits and inspire by pointing people toward eternity. That’s what makes the experience of being in a cathedral so powerful.
When I hear “inspire,” I think “expensive.” Can sacred space be economical?
Sure. People often feel more connected with the Creator of the universe in nature than in an opulent manmade facility. Sacred space can maximize God’s architecture—the natural landscape around the facility—to great effect.
What’s an example of functional and inspirational being combined successfully?
A biblical example is the tabernacle, basically a tent in the wilderness. It was very practical. But everything meant something. There was intentionality behind every material choice and every sculptural choice. The primary concern wasn’t occupancy but telling a narrative and conveying meaning.
So a church building should communicate a story?
The church should figure out a way to regain our spot back in the heart of the community.
Designed well it can communicate a congregation’s unique history and vision. Every church is a unique finger on the body of Christ. Every church facility should be a unique solution for each congregation’s ministry and local culture. And each church building should be responsive to God’s architecture—the unique way the wind, the sun, the topography, and the drainage all work in that location.
God is a God of place. In the Garden of Eden, God created a perfect environment so people could share fellowship with him and with each other. Later he gave his people specific plans for the desert encampment, the tabernacle, and the Temple. In each of these cases, place can either impair or facilitate connection and community—with God and with each other.
How can a building hinder community?
Let me give you an example unrelated to churches. The public housing projects of the twentieth century were built because the designers believed that everyone deserved decent housing. They wanted to get rid of the urban shanty towns. That was a good cause.
Unfortunately the replacements were built by modernist architects who thought of space primarily in functional, pragmatic terms. So they built tall, impersonal apartment buildings. They didn’t consider that when you disconnect people you dehumanize them. The residents no longer had eyes on the street where their kids were playing. And they didn’t have a physical connection with the outdoors anymore. The space created social instability. The experiment went so poorly that within 20 years, they had to demo the majority of the projects. The demolition of one housing project in St. Louis is considered the death of modernism in architecture. It marked architecture’s loss of faith in the aesthetic of function.
Fostering community is a challenge everywhere today, not just in public housing.
Years ago, before air conditioning, people would sit on the porch at dusk to cool off, and all of the neighbors did the same thing. People walked up and down the street. The porch served as an intermediary zone between the private space and the public space. It was the communal America where you actually knew your neighbor.
Today the basis of suburban planning is isolationism. We want to pull into our three car garage, file in through the kitchen door, and never have to talk to my neighbor. Now we have social isolation. It’s hard to physically connect with other people.
What does this mean for a church building?
When you look up the word ecclesia, the Greek word for “church,” you find out it’s a secular term referring to an assembly, the gathering of the citizens or denizens of a city. So we are talking about a container for people. That’s one function: it has to hold people.
But unlike a secular ecclesia, a Christian ecclesia must do more than facilitate horizontal connections between people. It must simultaneously facilitate a vertical connection with our Creator.
Historically this kind of sacred space has been both indoor and outdoor. And it has been mixed use, including worship, retail, and even residential space. The first church buildings, the basilicas, were the Roman shopping malls and government buildings. When the Christians had the opportunity to move out of the catacombs and take over the basilicas, it was like taking over the city hall, downtown office space, or the Wal-Mart building today.
So buying a large tract of land outside of town wasn’t their first instinct?
No, because the location of a church building says a lot. If a church finds its 20 acres in an undeveloped area and waits for the rooftops to follow them, this communicates to the community that Christians want to escape the urban areas to form a private haven.
Historically, the church was given the place of prominence on a hill or at the center of town. It was the faith-based anchor of a community. From the Greek agora, the Italian piazza, and the Spanish plaza, to the New England village greens, the very first thing that would get sited was the sacred space—the church.
Frankly, that’s what convicted me when I was designing Downtown Disney. We were modeling the area after European villages, and we recognized that we had a God-shaped hole in the center of our master plan that historically would have been filled by a cathedral. I found myself thinking, We have to fill this central spot with some of the same things that people try to fill that God-shaped hole in their lives with—entertainment, movies, sports, the consumer stuff. That got me thinking that maybe the church should figure out a way to regain our spot back in the heart of the community.
Beyond location, how do church buildings communicate to the wider community?
Think about churches with multiple buildings on a campus. The buildings usually face inward toward a green or fountain or some sort of gathering place. The front door is often away from the street. That means the buildings all face each other and the ugly backsides of the buildings are facing the neighbors. I call that “mooning the community.”
The idea of a campus is that it’s self-contained and separate—like a monastery. In the worst cases, campuses create Christian country clubs. You’ve got your own Christian school onsite. You’ve got sports leagues where your members play basketball only with other Christians, and the fellowship is fairly exclusive. It’s introverted; it isn’t outreach oriented or connected to the larger community.
How do you design facilities to focus outward?
Instead of building facilities that are used only for church functions and stay empty most of the week, churches are finding ways to share space with their neighbors.
Some churches with contemporary services are creating performing arts spaces that the outside community can use when the church doesn’t need the auditorium. We’ve actually branded a facility separately from the church.
One was called Stage One at Candlewalk. Candlewalk is the name of a mixed-use development, and Stage One is a church auditorium. The church uses the name Stage One when they’re selling tickets to a secular concert through Ticketmaster. Some people don’t ever know they’re in a church facility.
How would you advise a church plant that’s considering property and a building?
A church planter I spoke to recently wants to do something that is a blessing to the broader community, not just their own internal Christian community.
I suggested they do a community needs assessment while they conduct their own strategic ministry planning. They’ll determine the right strategy when they see where those lines intersect. The church might want to do homeless outreach, but if the neighbors do not want that in their backyard, the church might want to go somewhere else. We’ve got to consider our neighbors and not just ourselves in the ministry planning process.
How do you walk church leaders through this process?
We ask, “Who are we designing for?” The primary customer should be the community of the lost, those outside the walls. Ultimately if we’re working with a Spirit led, Bible based church, they tend to believe that God cares as much for the people who are driving by the church as he does for the ones that are already in the door.
I’ve become convicted that church walls are the biggest barrier between the church and the unchurched, the lost and the found, Christ and community. And our passion and mission has been to not let that happen.
Assuming the church wants to reach the lost, what’s next?
We ask, “What do you love and appreciate and celebrate about your community, both your church community and the local community? Where do you spend time when you’re not at home, church, or work? Where do you hang out? Where do you take visitors? What are the cultural competitors to the ministry here?”
Do you ask these questions to leaders or the whole church?
We encourage churches to make their brainstorming sessions open events so that once construction is under way, they can say with all honesty and integrity, “We gave everyone an open invitation to weigh in on this at the beginning.”
Because of our background in urban design and social activism, we also recommend that churches cast a wide net and include not only internal stakeholders but also external community stakeholders. Invite neighbors and local officials into the conversation even if they are not part of the church.
What if a church doesn’t really know what it wants?
That’s why conversation is important. People will usually have opinions from the beginning about general stewardship issues, cost effectiveness, and aesthetics. But once the designer starts raising questions about maximizing indoor and outdoor space, people will say, “We love these oak trees. We definitely want to protect those. We desperately need some active recreation space.”
It’s hard for people to describe what they like if they’re not trained in planning and design, but ultimately they know it when they see it. And that’s the comment we’re known for—”Yeah, that’s us. You heard us. You reflected us and where God’s taken us.” That’s what we want to hear. It can be a powerful moment when it feels like God is in the house and you feel that divine intervention in the design.
Is there a facility that came together in that way for you?
Yes, in Corona, California, the community had older stakeholders who had seen the old agrarian citrus groves disappear and turned into tract homes in a Spanish Mediterranean motif—I call it neo-taco architecture—standard for all their buildings. The city mandated that every gas station, every Wal-Mart, every tract home had to have a fiberglass red tile roof and stucco. But it had none of the quality and the integrity of some of the classic 1920s and ’30s era coastal towns.
The pastor wanted it to be the church of the new millennium to reach the next generation. His opinion was, “I don’t really care about Corona history and, frankly, I don’t think most of the people that move here care. They’re here because they can’t afford to be in Orange County.”
What was your first step?
Normally I would say we opened the Bible. That’s where 99 percent of these stories come from. But we opened, in this case, Webster’s dictionary and looked up the word corona. And rather than being Spanish for beer or crown, the dictionary definition that resonated with us was “a concentric circle of light surrounding a luminous body.” We immediately realized there was a powerful metaphor there—a circle of light, a circle of friends, the city on a hill.
We went to the city and proposed emulating an Italian hill town with a piazza and a church at the center rather than doing the cheesy fake stucco and Spanish tile. Even though it’s a contemporary cathedral with a very modern performing arts center, the plan was to let the church take that symbolic place as the cathedral on the piazza. The proposal included interactive fountains and a circle of palm trees. The city loved it.
How does that facility serve both the church and the community?
The piazza area creates space for the community to gather, and it houses a caf that is open to the public. There is education space on the site, and there are plans to expand with more retail and even residential space around it in the future.
In terms of design, it’s something that feels like Corona, a hybrid of where Corona has been, but also where the city, church, and neighbors want Corona to go. This project united the church’s vision, to be at the center of the community, with the community’s vision to have an upscale leisure and lifestyle district.
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