By David R. Bains

Segregation and the Saturn V rocket, these were two important facts of life in Alabama in the 1960s. A key battle in the fight to end race-based discrimination occured in Birmingham in 1963. That April groups seeking to integrate “all White” worship services were seated at the Cathedral Church of the Advent and First Baptist Church, but turned away from First Christian Church and the Birmigham Gospel Tabernacle. That September a terrorist bomb went off on a Sunday morning at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church killing four girls and leading to the death of two boys later that day. The next year the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed and three years later an Alabama-made Saturn V rocket made its first flight, two years later one would carry humans to surface of the Moon.

Amid these times, on December 4, 1963, the Second Vatican Council approved the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy. Its implementation would revolutionize Catholic liturgical space and influence many other Christians.

Many worship spaces in Birmingham bear witness to these times, but none more than Yeilding Chapel on the campus on Birmingham-Southern College. It was dedicated in 1967 as a companion to a plantarium erected three years earlier. A circular building with around altar in the center, it was fully in the current of liturgical creativity and change.

Another Methodist space that embraced innovation was the new sanctuary erected for Trinity United Methodist Church a decade later. It balanced the emphases on altar, pulpit, and choir by placing the choir together, but on one side, placing the altar and the head of the central aisle, and placing the pulpit near the center of the space, but not at the end of an aisle. With its use of traditional symbolism and conventional mosiac stained glass (by Willett Studios) it also strongly signaled tradition.

Many churches erected in this period bridged traditional and modern aesthetics in a tradtional plan. These included Vestavia Hills Baptist Church, First Church of the Nazarene, and Shades Mountain Baptist Church.

Near the end of this period Fr. Frank Muscalino spearheaded the effort to build St. Stephen the Martyr Catholic Church as a center for Catholic campus ministry to Birmingham-Southern, UAB, and Samford. The church, erected in 1991, was in the judgment of many the most extensive effort to express the centrality of the community and of liturgical participation in a Catholic building. Originally, a square wooden altar table stood in the center of a simple concrete square in the midst of a basically square church. The tabernacle was placed in a corner chapel opposite the baptismal font. While the ambo stood behind the table opposite the door to the church, there was nothing else to distinguish this (liturgically east) end of the church from the other three quadrants. After 2001, the church experienced various changes that made its space more conventional, but the altar, now clad in marble, remains at the crossing of the church.

The 1990s early 1990s also saw the emergence in Birmingham of churches that were shaped by the seeker-church movement and crafted places for what would be called contemporary worship. One of the first of these modern auditorium churches in Birmingham was the Church at Brook Hills, founded in 1990 and settled in the first units on its current site in 1993. The full flowering of these types of worship spaces, however, would occur in the last thirty years. The subject of the next (and final) page.

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This page is part of “Spaces for Worship: A Birmingham-Based Introduction,” a section of Magic City Religion, written by the editor, David R. Bains, and funded by Samford University’s Center for Worship and the Arts.