{"id":30860,"date":"2018-01-15T06:00:01","date_gmt":"2018-01-15T11:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/?p=30860"},"modified":"2018-01-16T07:42:13","modified_gmt":"2018-01-16T12:42:13","slug":"visiting-churches-when-i-was-seven","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/2018\/01\/visiting-churches-when-i-was-seven\/","title":{"rendered":"Visiting Churches When I Was Seven"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"St.<\/a><\/p>\n

My cousin Sharon saw my post about the Church of Tomorrow <\/a>and gave me a call.\u00a0 \u201cDo you remember when you first\u00a0saw\u00a0that church?\u201d she asked.\u00a0 \u201cNot really,\u201d I replied.\u00a0 \u201cI do.\u201d\u00a0 She then\u00a0recounted a revealing experience I had when I was seven years old.<\/p>\n

She was 11, she calculated, so her brother was 7, and I was the same age.\u00a0 Their sister would have been 2.\u00a0 My brother and sister, twins, would have been four.\u00a0 Her father, my Uncle Lloyd, was a Methodist minister (whom I still respect greatly to this very day).\u00a0 Our family was visiting theirs.\u00a0 Uncle Lloyd had just been assigned a congregation in suburban Oklahoma City.\u00a0 He told my parents about two new church buildings in the area that they really ought to see.<\/p>\n

\n

So both families piled into our huge befinned\u00a0cars\u2013the year was 1958\u2013and we went for a drive.\u00a0 First we stopped at the Church of Tomorrow, which I described on Friday, and we went inside.\u00a0\u00a0As the adults discussed the fine points of the architecture, my cousin and I were running up and down the aisles chasing each other.\u00a0 The younger kids were being noisy.\u00a0 (I\u2019m sure Sharon was well-behaved, as always.)\u00a0 Our parents would have tried to rein us in, but rowdy kids are a headache, so we soon left.<\/p>\n

Then we went to another new church building, built around the same time, St. Luke\u2019s Methodist Church.\u00a0 Whereas the architect of the so-called Church of Tomorrow was trying to design everything so that it seemed new, modern, and futuristic, the architect of St. Luke\u2019s was trying to do a modern take on traditional church design.\u00a0 Like a cathedral, the sanctuary was lit by stained glass windows and had a soaring ceiling.\u00a0 The eye was drawn immediately to the central altar, above which were three towering crosses.\u00a0 The pulpit was elevated and above where the pastor would preach floated something like a nimbus<\/a>.\u00a0 The\u00a0lines in the sanctuary\u2013from the structural elements, the draperies, the decorative details\u2013were all vertical, all pointing upwards, creating the sense of transcendence.<\/p>\n

As Sharon tells it, when we rambunctious kids went into the sanctuary, we stopped in our tracks.\u00a0 We became completely silent.\u00a0 We stopped playing.\u00a0 We didn\u2019t move.\u00a0 At that young age, we were in awe.<\/p>\n

Uncle Lloyd commented, \u201cSee what a sense of the sacred can do.\u201d<\/p>\n

That the sense of transcendence communicated by this church art and architecture got through even to young children who had little inkling of what any of it meant is very telling.\u00a0 There are aspects of Christianity that are not just about\u00a0intellectual knowledge and rational comprehension of ideas, nor are they emotional, as such, though they are experiential: the sense of\u00a0 mystery, a perception of holiness, the response of reverence.\u00a0 Even children can\u00a0recognize them, and adults would do well to cultivate them.\u00a0 And a genuinely religious art and architecture should aim at evoking them.<\/p>\n

What did it mean that the second-grader that I was then was completely\u00a0unaffected by the Church of Tomorrow\u2013though its\u00a0space-age style was\u00a0supposed to appeal to the younger generation when we grew up\u2013and yet I was deeply moved, even then, even so young, at St. Luke\u2019s?<\/p>\n

I have always treasured experiences of awe, of the sublime, and perhaps this has been part of my personality even as a child.Was my response an indication that I would eventually look for a kind of Christianity that was\u00a0richer, more mysterious, and more aesthetically powerful than that of the bland, liberal mainline Protestantism I was brought up in, an alternative that I found in Lutheranism?\u00a0 But not everyone with me then went on a similar journey.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not saying that children are necessarily going to be better behaved in one kind of church setting over another, but it would still do them good to be exposed to a setting that\u00a0elicits reverence.<\/p>\n

Now it\u2019s true that Methodists too, like the Disciples of Christ, are a mainline Protestant denomination, and they too have become liberal in their theology (at my uncle\u2019s resistance), though they have not gone so far as the Disciples.\u00a0 But St. Luke\u2019s is still a large congregation, unlike the Church of Tomorrow which has died out.\u00a0 In the sanctuary, they\u00a0hold a traditional Methodist service, with hymns and a choir that they take seriously. (They have a contemporary service, but it is held elsewhere, not in a site like this, the leaders of\u00a0this church recognizing as many others do not that the styles would clash.)<\/p>\n

I have been in a number of churches where the liberal theology from the\u00a0pulpit is at odds with the\u00a0design of the sanctuary, the symbolism of the decor, the lyrics of the hymns, and the substance of the creed that is confessed and the Scriptures that are read.\u00a0 The latter are timeless.\u00a0 But we also need timeless preaching from the pulpit.<\/p>\n

What is timeless frees us both from \u201ctomorrow\u201d and from old memories, pointing us to eternity.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Illustration:\u00a0 Historical Postcard, St. Luke\u2019s Methodist Church, via CardCow.com.<\/a><\/em><\/p><\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Was my response an indication that I would eventually leave the bland, liberal mainline Protestantism I was brought up in?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1281,"featured_media":30865,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,11,34,47],"tags":[3868,5535,478,6051,5982,6055,2123],"class_list":["post-30860","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-art","category-church","category-personal","category-theology","tag-children-in-church","tag-christianity-the-arts","tag-church-architecture","tag-church-of-tomorrow","tag-gene-veith-biography","tag-st-lukes-methodist-church","tag-sublime"],"yoast_head":"\nVisiting Churches When I Was Seven<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"My cousin recalled my visit to the Church of Tomorrow and to a very different modern church, St. Luke's Methodist, when I was seven, noting my reactions.\" 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