Church Made Theater

Church Made Theater December 11, 2015

Jeanne Halgren Kilde opens her When Church Became Theatre with a comparison of New Haven’s First Church of Christ (built 1814) with First Baptist of Minneapolis (built 1886). There had been a shift in the exterior, from “the classical pastiche of Greek and Roman to a medieval one with Gothic and Romanesque elements” (6). The more dramatic change was interior: 

“The rectangle of the Federalist church with its easily read longitudinal orientation had been replaced by a square room oriented diagonally toward a corner that housed not a pulpit hung high upon the wall but an elaborate stage elevated some three feet about the main floor. The term stage was truly an appropriate one, for the room was arranged more like a theatre or opera house than a church of previous generations.” There was still a pulpit of sorts, a mobile lectern, but it “was dwarfed by the features located behind and above it – the baptistery and choir, partially obscured by a short curtain, the grand organ console, and the stenciled organ pipes that soared to the ceiling” (6).

The floor was theatrical too, s it “sloped from the back of the room toward the stage at the front” as “arcs of curved pews radiated up to it from the stage. A balcony encircled most of the room, dropping slowly down to the stage level in a series of steps that distinctly resembled opera boxes.” The audience area “resembled nothing so much as the inverted spatial cone of the classical Greek and Roman amphitheatre” (6).

Worship changed with the space. Early in the nineteenth century, congregations “gathered on Sunday morning to listen to the minister offer prayer, read Scripture, and deliver a lengthy sermon explicating Scripture. The congregation might recite, or ‘line out,’ a psalm or hymn with the help of a precentor.” After a break for lunch, the congregation would have returned for another sermon in the afternoon. 

Late in the century, worship had changed, with gains and losses. By the 1880s, the sermon had been reduced from two hours to a half hour, and “it often addressed social topics quite afield from Scripture. Prayers . . . were by the end of the century often read from a book. The congregation now engaged in recitative exchanges with the minister, voicing either a psalm or a prayer of petition or praise. Music had become a more prominent part of the service,” and congregants could sing along without a leader because each had a hymnal (9).

The shift was, Kilde argues, a challenge to clerical domination of worship. The amphitheatre “with its emphasis on the corporate body of equals, indicated the power of those gathered, of the congregation, and that power was equal, if not superior, to that of the clerical performer upon the stage. The space itself announced that evangelical worship would tolerate no domineering priesthood” (199). At the same time, “the same amphitheatre features that made manifest the corporate body also encouraged audiences to remain quiet and passive as they focused their attention on stage. The theatrical spaces equated services with entertainment, and many evangelical churches also served as concert halls, offering organ, choir, and orchestra performances on a regular basis” (199). This latter impulse never took over worship, yet “the entertainment elements were important” (200). 


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