Hinch: Old's cool in church architecture

2013-10-11 12:33:45

You don't expect it, but there it is: A tall, slender, cross-topped church spire rising above the red tile roofs and sprawling office parks of outer Irvine.

The spire, adjacent to the San Joaquin Hills toll road, is made of wood, its style vaguely Craftsman. It's connected to a similarly Craftsman-style chapel set amid lush lawns, gardens and an artificial lake.

It's not a Disney church, though it could be. And it's not old (built just five years ago), though it was made to look old.

In fact, the chapel is the latest addition to Mariners Church, one of Orange County's largest and most forward-looking evangelical megachurches, where bands play alternative rock music and the head pastor takes cues from what he calls Christianity's future in the rapidly Christianizing developing world.

Yet when Mariners embarked on a major expansion of its campus a decade ago, adding a new worship center, youth building, cafe and picnic grounds, plans also included a wood chapel with wood chairs and banks of flickering candles. The goal for that part of the expansion was to look traditional, providing an intimate worship space alternative to the hangar-sized sanctuary (capacity 3,500) across the lake.

And it has worked. College-age members flock to Mariners' old-fashioned chapel, where younger pastors on staff preach and sometimes offer communion in services reminiscent of ancient Christian liturgy.

It's a striking juxtaposition, young worshippers filling a new chapel made to look old by a non-denominational church with no official ties to Christianity's institutional roots.

But it's not surprising, given a stubborn truth about Christianity, and indeed most of the world's major faiths: Architecture, especially old architecture, matters, even in today's wired world.

“The reason buildings have been important in the Christian tradition is (because) while Jesus says in the Gospel of John we're called to worship in spirit and truth, there's something hard-wired in the human psyche that wants a place, wants a gathering,” said Monsignor Arthur Holquin, pastor of Mission San Juan Capistrano.

I spoke to Holquin earlier this year about plans to transform the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove into a spiritual headquarters for Orange County's 1.3 million Catholics.

The county's Catholic diocese bought the 32-year-old cathedral last year for $57.5 million after the evangelical Protestant ministry led there by the Rev. Robert H. Schuller declared bankruptcy.

But the purchase was only the beginning, said Holquin. The cathedral would not be fit for Catholic worship until the interior, designed to showcase Schuller's worldwide television ministry, was gutted and replaced by ancient Catholic architectural elements.

“In Roman Catholic tradition, there are pivotal symbols that anchor us,” Holquin said, listing an altar, a baptismal font, a special seat for the bishop and even an aisle down the middle of the sanctuary where the priest and attendants can process to the altar.

Without those features, a cathedral is not a cathedral, Holquin said. Only a certain kind of building, laid out like churches centuries ago, will do.

And not just for Catholics, increasingly. Mariners built its traditional chapel in part to accommodate weddings (the church has a dedicated Web page for chapel wedding reservations). But Mariners also was responding to a much-reported shift in younger Christians' tastes in worship.

Michael Longinow, a professor at Biola University, an evangelical college in La Mirada, said many of his students are what he called “explorers who want to find churches that are different and interesting, and they'll go to a (Greek) Orthodox service, or Catholic, and they'll stick with it.”

What students seek at these more established churches, Longinow said, is “a very traditional liturgy, Masses, vaulted cathedral-type churches and pipe organs. Teens say, ‘I love that. It's so mean-ingful.' In the 1990s they said, ‘It's so dead. I hate that.'”

Even nonbelievers seek out traditional church architecture, though often without realizing it.

Anyone who gets married, indoors or out, who processes between rows of spectators to a raised space with an officiant is, knowingly or not, echoing the layout of a traditional church, which is where all weddings were performed until recent decades.

The irony of the persistence – perhaps the renaissance – of traditional church architecture is that the earliest church buildings, the ones influencing Christ Cathedral and Mariners chapel and every other traditional worship space, didn't start out as churches.

Jesus gave no instructions to his followers about where or how they ought to gather after his death. Early Christians, persecuted by secular authorities, met in houses.

Churches recognizable today as churches only appeared after Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire and Christians began worshipping in Roman legal halls called basilicas.

Christians used the basilicas because they wanted to avoid pagan temples. They converted the area where judges sat into space for an altar. Everything else they kept the same, modeling rituals and even priests' outfits (robes, etc.) on what the Romans did.

Despite this mixed heritage, traditional church buildings remain powerful communicators of faith. I know this from my own experience.

I became a Christian myself in part because I was so moved by chapel services at the college in England where I went to graduate school.

The college's 15th-century stone chapel was lit by candles and stained glass windows and backed by a wall filled floor to ceiling with carvings of saints. Sometimes I would go and sit in the chapel by myself, staring at that wall and the windows. I began to recognize the silence as holy.

And then there was last week, when my wife and kids and I took a vacation to New York City and returned on a Sunday morning to our old Episcopal church, St. Michael's on 99th Street, where Kate, an Episcopal priest, once worked, and where our kids were baptized.

St. Michael's, more than two centuries old, is a historical landmark, with stained glass windows designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany and a soaring Byzantine-style sanctuary.

Kate, Frances, Benjamin and I sat where we'd always sat, in a side chapel where parents with young kids congregate (kids can make noise there without bothering everyone else).

I gazed at the steps to the altar, where 1-year-old Frances used to practice her climbing after services (she's 6 now).

I remembered sitting up late at night in the candlelit chapel during Easter vigils.

I read the words carved into the wall behind the altar: “I am the bread of life. He that cometh to me shall never hunger and he that believeth in me shall never thirst.”

I thought about how this much-loved, much-used place had taught me to worship in ever deeper ways, the architecture itself always leading my eyes to those words behind the altar.

I cried a little, like I always do when I go back to St. Michael's, because there I had a direct experience of God – an experience carved long ago in stone and still alive in me, my kids and anyone else who has worshipped in an old and holy place.

The architecture doesn't make it holy. But it sure helped me to see the holiness. I bet the young people packing the Mariners chapel would agree.

Contact the writer: jhinch@ocregister.com

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