Power and Worship Spaces

Who does a worship space empower and how? This was a central theme of my colleague Jeanne Halgren Kilde’s When Church Became Theatre which she developed and extended in Sacred Power, Sacred Space. There she examines how churches express divine, social, and personal power.

In the first book, Kilde’s focus is on the classic auditorium church. She shows that when central-plan or auditorium churches were first introduced in America for Charles G. Finney and others, they empowered worshippers in a democratic society that challenged the powers-that-be and that therefore as Americans in the 1850s they were largely abandoned as there was a movement toward order and authority, but the auditorium churches returned in the 1870s.

Birmingham’s history only begins in the 1870s and its surviving ecclesiastical architecture from the late 1880s, so we do not have edifices to demonstrate this transition, but we do have many edifices that speak to the social power of worship. The Birmingham Historical Society identified 60 congregations (and their buildings) that participated in the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, the major local civil rights organization. All of the congregations were African American. Ten were Methodist (of various denominations), one each Congregational, Community, and Apostolic Overcoming Holy Church of God. The other 47 were Baptist. I believe that every one of them was a classic auditorium church (White 1998).

Only a few of these buildings, such as Sixteenth Street, Sixth Avenue, and Twenty-Second Avenue baptist churches were two-level auditorium churches with curved pews on the main floor. Most were more modest with straight pews facing a platform with a central lectern, with a choir behind. If a baptistry was included in the church it was generally part of the platform. The floor of part of the platform had to be lifted to use it.

View from the choir loft of the building that was originally First Baptist Church of Kingston (in Birmingham). It was in neighborhood churches such as this that most of the Civil Rights mass meetings occured prior to the major demonstrations of 1963. The Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth lead a notable meeting here on May 15, 1961, after Freedom Riders had been beaten by a crowd upon their arrival in Birmingham. NRHP no.05000300

Each however, enabled the combination of divine, personal and social power. In the evangelical tradition, to which all these churches belonged. Divine power is witnessed in the Bible, manifested in the experience of an individual (e.g., a preacher), and affirmed by the assembly (i.e., choir and congregation). However humble, these congregationally-owned auditorium churches provided spaces to empower the masses whose marches acheived the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The ways spaces shape the power relations between individuals, God, leaders, and groups will be suggested in our examination of the varieties of worship spaces in Birmingham.

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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.