Prayers rising past the immanent frame
Charles Taylor helps me understand my church’s architecture—and my own struggles with faith.
The sanctuary at First Congregational Church of Western Springs, in Illinois, was designed by Prairie School architect George Grant Elmslie and completed in 1929. (Century photos by Daniel Richardson)
I have served on the pastoral staff of First Congregational Church of Western Springs for more than a dozen years. In that time, I’ve heard my colleague Rich recount the origin of our sanctuary dozens of times. We intentionally regale every new member class with the story. The space itself is architecturally significant, as a placard by the entry doors notes: designed by the American Prairie School architect George Grant Elmslie, the building is on the National Register of Historic Places.
Sometimes I feel sheepish about our pride in our sanctuary and its impressive architect. (Did I mention that Elmslie worked with Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan? No? Must have been an oversight.) But, as the church architect E. A. Sovik writes, “Beauty evokes in us the sense of the holy. So artists and priests are companions in every religion.” Or as Rich likes to say, beauty is a portal to the Divine.
Elmslie was an agnostic who was more interested in the paycheck than religious companionship. When the congregation first contacted the architect in the mid-1920s, they wanted a neo-Gothic structure. After all, the neo-Gothic Tribune Tower in nearby Chicago had recently been completed, and it had renewed the American appreciation for buttresses and gargoyles. Elmslie, however, despised neo-Gothic style. As he admonished the building committee in a letter preserved in our church archives, “Gothic was once truly great architecture, but neo-Gothic is a bloodless simulacrum of what was once great architecture.”
