Posted on: Saturday, August 4, 2001
Churches embrace pray, play halls
Advertiser Staff and News Services
When the Rev. Aubrey Maye preached his first sermon in the soaring new sanctuary of Azalea Gardens Church of God in Virginia Beach, Va., he spoke of how this room will be filled with worship, fellowship and fun.
"Then I took out a basketball and dribbled it down the center aisle. It was a real eye-opener for some people," Maye recalls.
Like scores of evangelical churches around the country, Azalea Gardens felt the call for a multipurpose, gymnasium-size hall fit for prayer on Sunday, hoops on Monday, banquets on Friday and concerts on Saturday.
At Faith Christian Church in Bradenton, Fla., there's a ministry team devoted to setup and tear-down tasks weekly in their new pray-and-play hall with court lines on the carpeting.
Slap. Off go the theater seats (pews are passe).
Zip. The portable baptismal tub gets pushed out of bounds.
Whoosh. In comes the portable basketball goal.
Pastors say a pray-and-play hall makes maximum use of believers' dollars, in keeping with the biblical charge to be good stewards of God's bounty. Often it is an intermediate step in a long-term plan.
Faith Christian Church moved from rented schoolrooms into its $1.2 million hall in March.
"A pure sanctuary is really limited," said the pastor, Scott Clark. "You don't get the most use for your dollar with attached seats and a firm stage where you can only really be in there once a week. Our goal was to get as much as we could for our building.
"If you are a church starting up, you have to think outside the box. Church today is very different than when I grew up. Everywhere you look, things are portable, flexible, temporary, used, moved and stored."
The trend has spiritual parallels. "In religion, people are breaking down the walls of denominationalism, and our nondenominational church reflects this," Clark said.
Every year churches spend more than $49 billion on everything from altars to computers, pews to paper clips, carillons to choir robes to outfitting existing churches and 6,000 new construction or renovation projects, according to "Your Church" magazine.
The architecture and interior design of these buildings reflect a congregation's way of approaching faith. The trend has carried over locally.
"This is a new trend in Hawai'i with the new, larger churches and we really like it," said Ralph Moore, pastor for Hope Chapel in Kane'ohe. "We think that people have been isolated from the church for too long. A multipurpose church can meet the needs of regular people, and it draws people to us."
Hope Chapel, which built its auditorium two years ago on Castle Hill, has held music concerts, aerobic classes and sleep-overs for kids in the same place where the church holds services five times a week, said Moore.
"Making our church multipurpose was very important to us, it was something we wanted to build," said Moore, who has been a pastor for 18 years. "Everything inside our auditorium can be moved away, and we really try to do different things with our multipurpose church."
For the first time last night, Moore said, the church brought in round dining tables from its outside courtyard into the auditorium for a music concert.
Patrick Downes, spokesperson for the Catholic Diocese of Honolulu and editor of Hawai'i Catholic Herald, said some churches in Hawai'i build multipurpose churches for flexibility and economics.
"Flexibility serves for better participation," Downes said. "Certain liturgical seasons like Christmas and Holy Week can be better celebrated if you could rearrange the church's set-up."
The trend hasn't been happily received universally.
In the news: a boiling battle in Milwaukee over the renovation of the city cathedral, which sparked complaints all the way to the Vatican. The matter is not merely one of removing pews, shifting the altar, refocusing the seating and replacing the organ. The changes convey shifting ideas about priestly authority, the community of lay people and the value of tradition that not all agree upon.
But such brouhahas are rare. Many believers are enthusiastic about the changing look of churches, said Tom McElheny, an ordained minister and CEO of ChurchPlaza, Inc.
McElheny spots trends in worship styles:
• Liturgical churches such as Catholic or Episcopal often use a sanctuary solely for worship, making them the lingering market for pews while other churches shift to theater seating.
"We sold 50,000 chairs two years ago, and we expect to sell 150,000 next year," he said.
• Praise and worship churches such as charismatic and Pentecostal groups with lots of singing and movement in their services forgo stages for low risers set wide apart, "so people can easily come forward to join the singing or dance, testify or be healed."
• "Altar call" churches such as Southern Baptist churches, which invite people to accept Christ in every service, may still have pews "but the traffic patterns are designed for wide aisles for people to reach the altar."
• "Seeker-friendly" churches, "the ones that want to look like a community center to avoid people's early bad memories of church," order music and drama supplies for a Broadway-style stage.
"They want an environment that's comfortable and non-threatening, not churchy," he said.
Sometimes the building itself doesn't even say "church."
