Church Architecture Shapes Worship

Three basic layouts for worship halls...and what they communicate

By Brad Isbell

What a church looks like on the outside—what we usually mean when we say architecture—is relatively unimportant. The primary work of the church, and the primary way a church is worked on and built up, is through the means of grace, its worship, which generally takes place indoors on this continent in this century. This means the layout and furnishing of the worship hall¹ is of great importance. This even applies in temporary or rented spaces. There are three main layouts.

FIRST, is the split chancel, which we might also call the cathedral plan. This space may be square, but is usually rectangular and longer than it is wide, with the pulpit and table located on one of the short sides. There is often a long center aisle, which lends itself to processions and ceremony. This layout did not infect Reformed churches in the US until the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The lagging but pernicious effect of the early 19th century’s high church Oxford Movement in England led to grand but ungainly buildings replacing simpler ones in the US, and saw central pulpits shifted to the side in deference to elevated tables, massive organs, and ornament.

The split chancel is absolutely the worst layout for a Reformed church, which ought to value the centrality of preaching, spoken prayers, readings, confessions, and congregational singing over high church affectations, accoutrements, and accretions. Many churches inherited this layout; amazingly, some churches have willingly adopted it in new construction, even in the last few decades. Here’s an extreme example, built in the 1920s by a wealthy, liberalizing mainline presbyterian church:

There’s a game we can play here: not “Where’s Waldo?,” but “Where’s the pulpit?” That’s the pulpit over on the right, dwarfed by the organ and bumped off center by the elevated table and gold cross. Many split chancels had choir seating on one or both sides or centered behind the table. This one, rather bizarrely, has a choir in the sky! The front side galleries were probably originally intended for singers or musicians, too. The ministry of the Word is not central, spatially or otherwise—that much is clear. In many ways, this layout is indistinguishable from countless American churches built from the late 1800s by Methodists, Anglicans, Presbyterians, and a few other confused flavors of mainline churches. The vibe is “felt Anglican, might change later.” Few did.

Musically, the prioritization of organs and choirs meant that congregants were expected to be sung at or sonically blasted, and the singing of the people became unimportant…and inaudible. The focus on the visual suggests that the sufficiency of scripture was devalued. That such churches were built shows that Protestant doctrine was in decline and that many previously orthodox churches were doomed. History bears this out.

SECOND, we have the stage style, which can be thought of as a variant of the split chancel. At the front of the worship space, there’s a stage. If anything is elevated, it is the audience-congregation, looking down on the proceedings. Sometimes there is sloped, theater-style seating…sometimes with actual fold-up theater seats. The stage is the focal point, and the problem with the stage is its blank canvas nature: what you place or do on it is infinitely variable. If there is a pulpit, it is usually small and portable, and may be lost in a jumble of musical instruments and equipment. In megachurches, there is room for massive productions, big bands, props, cattle trough baptisteries, and even rollercoasters. Sometimes the preaching is done from a music stand. Or there may be no lectern at all—the speaker wanders around like a TED Talker or pitchman. Informality and adjustability predominate with this layout. It resembles the split chancel in its visible jumble and in its concessions to musical performance.

An empty stage may encourage mischief. A couple of sites (now particularized congregations) of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City (seen above and below) help illustrate this. While tastefully simple and laudable in some ways, certain problems with the stage are apparent. A popular online phrase these days is, “You can just do things.” Yes, with a stage, you can do things that you might not otherwise do. In the case of one of the Redeemer congregations over the last decade, these things have included the occasional use of liturgical ballet in the middle of a Lord’s Day service.

Moving the preacher’s music stand aside presents no difficulty; justifying such “art” in a Reformed church with the Regulative Principle in its confession is a bit harder.

THE THIRD layout is the simple, central pulpit. That pulpit may be large or small. Depending on whether there are galleries or a balcony, it may be wise to elevate it. To be honest, it may be wise to elevate it anyway. Centrality, elevation, and even size may serve to reinforce the centrality of preaching and the priority of the Word of God in the means of grace and in the life of the church. There are ways to undermine a central pulpit, effectively “lowering” it. These include dwarfing it with choir seating, overshadowing it with a large organ or a musical setup akin to that of a touring rock band, or providing a gaudy, distracting background of images or other visual elements. Here’s a modern example of a PCA worship hall built to support the ordinary means of grace:

Classical examples are found throughout Scotland, during the American Colonial period, and across the US prior to the early 20th century. Prior to amplification, proximity to the pulpit was important to aid audibility. This is illustrated by the remarkable “Temple de Paradis,” once found in Lyon in the 16th-century heyday of the Huguenots:

Church layout shapes the worship of the church, reflecting the theology behind it, and thus is more important than we think.

The Auditoire next to Cathédrale Saint-Pierre in Geneva is where Calvin did much of his preaching. To make it more speaking-hearing friendly, Calvin had the pulpit hung on one of the long walls so that the hearers might, well, hear.

In more recent times, the building layout has been “updated,” regressing to a sort of split chancel with a diminutive pulpit pushed to one side on the narrow end of the nave, dwarfed by an organ, table in the center.

On the side wall on the right, you can see where the pulpit was.

Here are some good articles on church architecture from our friend Barry Waugh.

1. I believe the term worship hall is much preferable to sanctuary, which implies a sort of sacrificial, sacerdotal temple worship. Having been involved in the design and construction of my own church’s building, I often found myself referring to the worship hall as the big room…at least everyone knew which room I was talking about.