ChurchScape

Megachurches and the Iconography of Environment

Susan Power Bratton

• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781481303859
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Chiesa cristiana

Buildings and landscapesare as much a part of the Christian church as its creeds—reflecting the faith and proclaiming God. The architecture of the church'sstructures and the curating of its groundsare unique windows into the church's history and the shape of its theological commitments. Birthed in the iconoclastic spirit of the Reformation, the scapes of Protestant churcheshave experienced massive shifts in design and scope. From humble beginnings—small buildings and cemeteries—churches today can occupy thousands of square feet across hundreds of acres. The modern megachurch, with itsextensivecampuses, parking lots, and sprawling lawns, has changedhow we think about the church and its spaces. Form follows function, and theology is in both. The shifts inscale, style, and symbolwithin the church's common spacesreflect changes in ecclesial priorities, even as theyformthe theological imagination in new ways. In ChurchScape, Susan Bratton chronicles the story of the Protestant church's transformation of landscape and building. Citing the influence of college campuses on megachurch architecture, Bratton examines the features that are a part of many megachurch complexes, including waterscapes, iconography, and outdoor art. Taking readers on a cross-country journey to over two hundred churches, Brattontracesthe movement from the small parish building of the nineteenthcentury to the extensive complexes that form today's churchscapes. As she moves from church to church, Bratton describes howallthe church's spaces—buildings, greens, gardens, and gateways—togethershape its practices, name its beliefs, and form its life together. Bratton's work offers the first historical and theological analysis for the megachurch and itsphysical planners and planters. She demands that all of us look with new eyes at the ways the church may be an innovator without being disruptive, a place of communitywithoutbecomingexclusive, and a site of abundancewithoutdecadence. The church-in-place mustconsider how its scapes and spaces reflectits sacred life.

Part I

History

1

Greens

Christians and Urban Planning

Radical Change in Belief, Radical Change in Religious Landscapes

Changes in church landscapes reflect major changes in theology, particularly concerning the relationship between church and state and between Christianity and its socioeconomic context. It may seem odd, but in order to understand the origins of the American megachurch landscape, it is necessary to return to the Reformation’s impact on European beliefs concerning sacred ground and church polity. Megachurches have expanded the size of property holdings and the complexity of church grounds. The Reformation had, in general, the opposite effect—it reduced the size of ecclesiastical land holdings and removed many gardens and other exterior features attached to monasteries and churches. Medieval monastic gardens were multipurpose, supporting prayer and study, producing food and medicine, offering refreshment and beauty, and receiving the bodies of the dead.1 The English cloister garden, in the center of a monastic house, was simple—primarily turf with a tree or two. Its perpetual green symbolized renewal. The monks processed across the garth several times a day as they celebrated the sacred hours. The cloister garden was nestled next to the church, thereby embedded in sacred space and time.2 Medieval painting depicted the Annunciation in a walled garden with symbolic flowers, such as lilies representing purity. The garden was an analog of paradise and the original creation of Genesis.3

While having no issues with gardens per se, the Reformers and, more important, the princes and kings who supported religious and political change had a multiplicity of reasons for disbanding the monasteries and confiscating church lands. When the English monarch Henry VIII began the process of liquidation, approximately 10,000 monasteries and other religious foundations were distributed throughout his realms. Even more lucrative, the monastic houses gleaned a tempting fifth of the entire national income. With Thomas Cromwell supervising the process, Henry granted some of the lands to his allies and friends and sold other church estates, gaining the political support of the gentry and businessmen who bought the fertile fields and the woods with their valuable standing timber. Cromwell’s troops drove the last monks out of Waltham Abbey in 1540. Arguments before Parliament inaccurately magnified the sins of the cloister. Their adversaries depicted the monastic houses as dens of immorality and the monks as lazy and exploitive. Nonetheless, Henry’s policies helped remove the old economic order in the countryside and encouraged upward mobility for the gentry. Some of the income went to such noble purposes as establishing or expanding grammar schools and colleges, including Trinity College at Cambridge University. English parish churchyards remained intact, even as Cromwell raided the riches of English shrines, disinterred national hero Saint Thomas à Becket in order to burn his remains, and defaced even remote Irish chapels.4

What began by royal mandate continued in the hands of local Protestant officials and mobs bent on vandalism. The destruction of the English friaries was so complete it extended to demolition of their orchards, and left nary a monastic garden intact.5 The herb gardens, producing valuable medicinal compounds, became patches of weeds. Iconoclasts not only axed the holy trees associated with saints; they also splintered village Maypoles as pagan holdovers.6 The religiously fueled English Civil Wars (1642–1651) leveled woodlands for tactical reasons; fighters used logs for barricades. In the midst of theological cleansing that was often politically motivated, “elaborate Renaissance gardens came to seem by some as symptoms of the crypto-Catholic decadence and prodigality of the Caroline court and its entourage.” With religious purification as a justification, antiroyalists wrecked statues, fountains, ornamental plantings, and even fishponds on private estates in their unrelenting purge of the old social order and its memory.7 The overall effect of the Reformation in countries ruled or populated by Protestants was the reduction of the total acreage, individual size, diversity, and ornamentation of church property holdings. On a more positive note, the English Reformers did value the landscape as “a forum for more intimate encounters with the divine.”8 Denying that any particular locale was more sacred or effective for prayer than another, Protestants broadened the selection of sites where they nourished their souls. They favored private gardens and quiet, woodland walks as opportunities for reflection.9 Evangelists and poets sought solitude and insight as they carried their Bibles outdoors to the hay meadows and wooded dells.

Architectural Simplicity

As the Reformation progressed and generated a multitude of sects, the more nonconformist (i.e., outside the norms of the established church) the trajectory, the more Protestants committed to simplicity in church art and architecture. John Calvin’s followers whitewashed church walls, broke stained glass windows, and pulled down crucifixes and images of saints. Calvin’s Chapel in Geneva, Switzerland, still has an unadorned interior, without paintings or narrative stained glass.10 Church architecture became a key identifier in distinguishing the more radically reformed sects, such as Puritans and Pietists, from those retaining older liturgical, sacramental, and representational visual culture, such as Anglicans and Roman Catholics.11 The radicals expressed their values through their places of worship. Architecture reflected a commitment to the church or meeting as the human community rather than as a remarkable or well-decorated edifice. Their ascetic ideals discouraged ostentatious architecture and elaborate decoration of religious spaces. They believed that displays of wealth could accentuate social class and prompt greed and jealousy; architecture could divide and socially stratify Christians as easily as it could unite them.

The Reformers distrusted iconography, particularly sculpture, which might promote idolatry and detract from attention to the Bible and its interpretation through the spoken word. They simultaneously forwarded the concept of an omnipresent and immanent deity who is everywhere equally present, and no more accessible in designated sacred space than in the surrounding landscape.12 For the plain sects, the lack of ornate doorways, exterior carvings, and towers reduced attention-grabbing visual effects and statements of ascendency, yet it increased the connectivity and sense of belonging to the greater cultural and natural landscape. The religious buildings and their grounds expressed an antihierarchal or antiaristocratic interpretation of Christian leadership, based in the priesthood of all believers.13

Out of a belief that some spaces were more sacred than others, medieval Christians desired to be interred close to the altar, adjoining the graves of saints or the nexus of divine presence embedded in the Host. English cathedrals and parish churches buried their aristocratic patrons in crypts in the walls or under the floor. In rejecting any notion of holy ground, Reformed theology eliminated the demand for Christians to be buried in consecrated soil inside the bounds of churchyards. The attack on the cult of the saints left shrines and their environs disempowered.14 A few extant early American churchyards retain the medieval convention of burials up to the front door and adjoining the walls. Consecrated in 1700 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Gloria Dei, or Old Swedes Church, continued the merger of the graveyard with the churchyard (Fig. 1.1). Their brick building replaced a blockhouse, where the settlers of the Delaware Valley first met in 1677. Initially Swedish Lutheran, the affiliation is now Episcopalian.15 Gravestones occupy the outdoor spaces closest to the nave as open swaths of lawn remain farther from the church. Respecting strong intergenerational ties, the burials link ancestry with an especially sacred site. Lutherans and Anglicans transferred the spatial components of the traditional parish church into the American scene to a greater extent than the Nonconformists did. Early Puritan arrivals in New England, in contrast, established their burial grounds some distance away from their meeting houses to avoid any confusion over their rejection of designated holy ground.16

Figure 1.1

Located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Gloria Dei, known locally as Old Swedes Church, maintains the traditional practice of burying the dead adjoining the worship space for the living. The church building was completed in 1700. A robust brick wall encircles the entire yard.

The elimination of the requirement for consecrated buildings advantaged Protestant adaptation to the frontier. The first Christian colonists met in any available large room, including a barn or an inn, or they built a temporary log church. Replaced by more substantial structures, these protochurches have largely disappeared, even in more remote regions like the southern Appalachians. Rather than purchasing or importing construction material, the members would trim logs themselves and sit on handmade plank benches. As glass was either expensive or unavailable, the carpenters installed open windows to light the pulpit. Beyond the turnpikes or in the mountains, the log church might lack a defined lawn. Even for denominations favoring steeples and wide porticos, these initial American centers of worship were rustic and homey.

The Radical Reformation’s erasure of sacred space was integral to the reconfiguration of Christian rituals and officiating practices. Puritans and their denominational descendants, the Congregationalists, offered only two sacraments—Communion and baptism. The Friends increased the participatory functions of meetings to such an extent that services lacked a designated presider and proceeded “through the actions of the gathered congregation.”17 Formalism in Christian architecture had been associated with liturgical services presided over by an ordained priest. The non- or antiformalism of the colonial American meeting house architecture reflected the social and ritual reorganization transpiring inside.18

The Reformation blurred the boundaries between sacred and civic and between public and private religious terrains. Weddings and funerals took place in private homes, and in rural areas burials were in family plots. Ordained clergy were optional for funerals as there was no longer a requirement for unction or a final confession. Corpses lay on beds or a table at home until pallbearers carried them to the cemetery. Clergy arrived in the kitchen to comfort the bereaved rather than making one last effort to hear a confession to reduce time in purgatory.19 In the days of high infant mortality, ministers often avoided long delays and baptized newborns at home. Despite this spatial independence, Protestants emphasized the importance of gathering believers for key rituals and absorbing God’s word. A single priest could no longer offer a mass alone before God—the rank and file had to assemble to share the Lord’s Supper.

The Reformers eliminated the seasonal processions and Saint’s Days of Roman Catholicism, thereby reducing religious rituals moving through village streets. Protestant practitioners of full-immersion baptism, however, conducted informal processions from churches into secular terrains, marching down the dirt road to the closest river—Baptists deemed this public act as an ordinance rather than a sacrament. In some variants initiates wore white robes symbolizing both their future entrance into the angelic realms and eternal life and their cleansing in the blood of Jesus. The celebratory rites incorporated hymns, extemporaneous preaching, and public prayer. The “saints” might leave the church singing and clapping as they rejoiced in the blessing of divine rebirth and freedom from death. Lining the bank or encircling a spring, church members, including children, would stand right at the water’s edge, demonstrating their engagement with the ritual. In rural settings families would return to the church for dinner on the ground or bring a picnic lunch to enjoy on the willow-shaded banks of the tributary. Thereby, they turned a half-minute anointing into an all-day festivity. Although most U.S. churches now have indoor baptisteries, outdoor baptism is still a widespread practice and is experiencing a revival, particularly among Sun Belt megachurches.

Meetings instead of Churches

In regions where they were persecuted, the new sects met in homes, outbuildings, and even in the woods, separating them further from attachments to specific sacred structures. The Nonconformist denominations, such as Baptists (traditions that have been the most prominent in the production of megachurches), initially avoided the term “church,” preferring the epithet “meeting house.” As the radicals replaced their temporary shelters, the first generation retained simplicity as a Christian virtue rather than as a mechanical or fiscal constraint. The typical meeting house had a single large room with either pews aligned toward a pulpit rather than an altar or, depending on the sect, a circle of benches with no pulpit at all. Many larger colonial meeting houses had balconies to provide additional seating. Families bought or rented box pews, which had doors on the ends. The location of the pew reflected the social status of the sponsor. The galleries with open benches were for bachelors, slaves, itinerants, the poor, and others without full status or permanent standing in the community.20 The exterior austerity of the built environment did not unilaterally erase entrenched hierarchies within.

The simplicity and utility of the meeting house extended to its setting, which had a domestic appearance, or a minimalist aspect—devoid of gardens, lawn ornaments, and representational art. With the exception of graveyards, the first meeting house grounds typically lacked zones or designated areas for specialized uses. Built in 1760, Stony Brook Meeting House provided a view of the Battle of Princeton, seventeen years later, as the land in ...