The Romanesque sanctuary of South Main Baptist Church near downtown Houston may seem like a strange home for the Gen-X faithful in the Ecclesia Christian Community.<\/p>\n\n
The church holds 1000, which means there are acres of empty oak pews when the 250-plus in the Rev. Chris Seay\u2019s new congregation gather on Sunday nights. But the sanctuary with the giant rose window has one essential element welcomed by the singles, artists and seekers in trendy urban neighborhoods \u2014 beauty.<\/p>\n\n
\u201cIt\u2019s as close to a Baptist cathedral as you can get,\u201d said Seay. \u201cIt may not be the right size for us, right now, but it still feels right. \u2026 It has amazing stained-glass windows. You can look around and see the whole life of Christ. It feels like a real church, a sacred space.\u201d<\/p>\n\n
But this is tradition-PLUS. The sanctuary also has room for three projection screens and an arc of television monitors. Seay and his team of Ecclesia (Greek for \u201cchurch\u201d) musicians and artists use these multi-media tools to surround worshippers with a swirling sea of visual art during their worship services, which can last nearly two hours.<\/p>\n\n
Sometimes the images connect with the words of the sermon, music, prayers or scriptures. But often they do not. Then there are times when worshippers are free to drift over to \u201ccreative spaces\u201d in which they can paint or sculpt their impressions of what is happening in the service. Seay invited a painter to work behind him at Easter, so that his flock could watch as an impressionistic image entitled \u201cThe Body of Christ\u201d developed during the sermon.<\/p>\n\n
The point of all this, said Seay, is to tell a story that touches hearts and invites people into a community, not to conquer unbelievers through a barrage of Western rationalism and legal arguments. He is part of a growing movement of postmodern church leaders who want to blend past and present, the ancient and the digital, to create new forms of worship that appeal to all the senses \u2014 sight, sound, touch, smell and taste.<\/p>\n\n
\u201cMost of us have grown up with worship that is like a one-lane highway,\u201d said Seay, who is 28. \u201cYou get one message at a time, one after another, either a hymn or a prayer or a sermon. That isn\u2019t how people live today. \u2026 We want to create a multi-lane highway during worship, because we know that people \u2014 especially young people \u2014 can handle many different messages, even if they are stacked on top of each other.\u201d<\/p>\n\n
Seay is a Baptist, but his sponsors and co-workers in this project range from conservative Presbyterians to mainline Methodists. They want to build a congregation that is truly \u201cmulti-denominational\u201d and linked to other bodies, not one of the free-floating, \u201cnon-denominational\u201d churches that have radically altered the face of contemporary American Protestantism.<\/p>\n\n