One of four factors shaping the experience of worship spaces.

What are the general feelings a worship space as a whole awakens in people who enter it? What does the look and feel of a space suggest about what it means to worship and the relationship between a worshiper and God? These are questions that help us understand the aesthetic impact of a worship space.

Worship spaces are products of particular cultures. Worshipers approach them as people shaped by their experiences of other spaces, places, and art forms. Thus the impact of a particular space on an individual is the result of a dialogue between the building and what the worshipers brings to it. Buildings do not influence everyone the same way. In some ways aesthetic impact is culturally dependent. Yet because the experience of a space is a bodily experience and most humans have similar bodily properties (a certain range of heights, two eyes, a certain range of walking paces), there are also some near universal experiences of certain aesthetics.

Richard Kieckhefer in Theology in Stone, relates the aesthetic impact of a church to the idea of allurment. How do the overall aesthetics of a space encourage people to worship God or allure them visit the building and participate in the church’s worship (Kieckhefer 2004, 97).

Many Birmingham churches, including Cathedral Church of the Advent, the Cathedral of St. Paul, and Hodges Chapel are large resonant spaces, with beautiful artistic details and very high ceilings. They intentionally craft themselves as a space apart, a house of God. They seek to allure people to worship by inspiring reverence, awe, peace, and praise. The neo-Gothic aesthetic of the Advent might also suggest enchanting mystery. The bright legiblity of Hodges or even more so Canterbury United Methodist Church on the other hand may allure with a sense of rationality and reason.

This begins to get into the cognative meaning of spaces, the ideas they evoke through the association people make with their structure, images, and repeated use. This brings us to our last factor: symbolic resonance.

This post is part of “Spaces for Worship: A Birmingham-Based Introduction,” a section of Magic City Religion, written by David R. Bains, published in 2024, and funded by Samford University’s Center for Worship and the Arts.