It is truly awesome to see the variety of our A.M.E churches. Each is beautiful in it's own right for we come together to worship and praise God. I would love to hear about the various style os churches in our denomination. If you rent space for church i would like to hear about that also. What does your church building look like? Who designed it? Or if you were to build a new church today what would it look like. Thanks everyone I learn more each day from each of you. God bless!!

-- Anonymous, October 02, 2002

Answers

Reverend Rogers:

This question that you pose is of great interest to me, as my formal training is in architecture. While I've left architecture to enter ministry, architecture has not left me. :)

My home church was built in 1981, 2 year after a previous building burned. (My church was established in 1836.) We have always been a small country church, but our membership numbers approximately 2200 persons. When the current building was built, it had a seating capacity of about 450-500 persons. The plan is roughly a quarter- circle, and the pews are arranged auditorium style. There is no center aisle, which really irks me. I'm a bit of a traditionalist when it comes to the design of the church sanctuary.

In an effort to minimalize the impact of such a large structure replacing the building that had burned, the architect designed a portion of the current building to be reminiscent of the old building, and then he attached the auditorium-style sanctuary to that. This marriage was not a good one, and we are coming to that realization some 20 years later. About 18 months ago, we embarked on a plan to expand so that we can cease having non-worship activities in the sanctuary. Most of our members are of one mind that the sanctuary is to be snactified, and that very little outside of worship experiences should happen in that space. So we are adding about 18,000 feet of additional program space, and in the process, the architect has done a fantastic job of minimalizing the impact of the size of the church.

I'll stop there, as I tend to ramble on about architecture almost as much as I do theology. :)

In His peace,

-- Anonymous, October 07, 2002

Wow! This is very exciting information. And thanks for sharing your background with us. I hope you have had some imput in the design of the new space. I would love to hear more. For instance I have noticed that a lot of the new churches being built across the country look like those big box stores, sams club, costco etc. What about those of us who like traditional designs. What are your thoughts?

-- Anonymous, October 07, 2002