Book Review: Shaping the Assembly: How Our Buildings Form Us in Worship

This year marks the 60th anniversary of the promulgation of the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy. It is normal that such ecclesial events continue to have theological gravitational pull well into the future, as indeed such great historical moments in the life of the church are intended to have. Remembering that Sacrosanctum Concillium was in fact the product of almost 100 years of the larger liturgical and ecumenical movement and not simply an unforeseen beginning, the strength of the orbit of its liturgical ideas and ideals is even more explicable. And yet, the academy today is alight with sensibilities around the reception of ecclesial events and documents, theological pluralities, and the continuing development and evolution of belief and praxis through research, reflection, and pastoral practice.

In my experience however, liturgical scholarship can often too easily fall into the perceived gravitational well of Sacrosanctum Concilium, perceiving it and the theological ideas emerging in the surrounding decades as having definitively resolved all liturgical questions and consequently closing the door to differing perspectives, proclaiming them illegitimate in light of the liturgical renewal. A type of ossification sets in and subsequent developments and insights are not taken account of. I would contend that this ossification of vision is especially true regarding sacred art and architecture. The gravitational pull of a supposed golden age of liturgical progress and creativity, which just happens to coincide with Brutalism and Mid-Century Modern, pulls us closer to the past of an imagined Ur-event of liturgical renewal the further time advances. Unfortunately, Shaping the Assembly: How Our Buildings Form Us in Worship is indicative of this dynamic. It is substantially a book that lives in the past, rightly giving homage to the liturgical renewal of the previous century, but with little to say about the future. At times reading the random and editorially uncontrolled essays is like sitting with a beloved grandfather who meanders from one unrelated but predictable story to the next which one has listened to for the umpteenth time. The reader is soon aware of this nostalgic-seeming time lag, noting that a large portion of references, both books and examples of liturgical space (black and white images), are from the 1950s to 2000. As usual for a book regarding church architecture in the tenor of the liturgical reform, Schwarz (1947), Hammond (1960), and Giles (1996) receive their abundant obligatory citations.

In as much as the essays can be said to have an underlying theme it is introduced in the opening essay. Thomas O’Loughlin, the book’s editor, seeks to build a theology of liturgical space from the idea that the liturgy of early Christians was supposedly domestic in its orientation, repeating the idea that such a primal and authentic arrangement was distorted, if not corrupted, by the expansion of the church into the broader Roman culture. He suggests that a paleo-Christian liturgy was forced into buildings, thereby seeming to eschew the possibility that an evolving liturgy and its architectural surroundings were a legitimate expression of Christian practice and belief. ¹ In essence, the essay repeats the premise put forward by the German protestant art historian Friedrich Deichmann, namely, that one can find a hypothesized essential early-Christian conception of worship and architecture, an idea which eventually influenced persons such as Rudolf Swartz. ² Access to this supposed early-Christian intentionality means that for present day worship to be authentic it must be characterized by this biblical and pre-Constantinian world, a clarity of vision which it is thought the liturgical reform set out to recapture, and indeed did so accurately for all times. ³ Reduced to its core, the argument relies upon the common assertion made within the early decades of the liturgical movement that the celebration of the Word emerged from the practice of the synagogue, and that the Eucharist emerged from domestic dining. ⁴ In light of this argument from origins, certain aesthetic priorities within the liturgy therefore become necessary, it is argued: intimate, familial, human scale, flexible, common, communal, non-ritualistic. ⁵

What is clear is that liturgical scholarship has moved well beyond this simplistic conception of the origins of Christian worship, and to a more sophisticated estimation of what any epoch of Christian worship means for practice today. The author does accurately note that ‘eucharistic action does not come to us as a decontextualized ritual.’ ⁶ It would have been helpful then when setting out to determine what a church building is, how it functions, and its purpose, to have had in the opening essay a broader dialogue with contemporary research. Paul Bradshaw, Oskar Skarsaune, and others have questioned the supposed Jewish origins of Christian ritual. Andrew McGowan and Martin Stringer have questioned the precise domestic origins of Christian meals, even identifying non-domestic practices and meanings. Michael White, Robin Jensen, and others have sought to understand early Christian worship through the lens of material culture revealing that Christians were far more in line with their cultural cultic counterparts. In short, what has emerged in the past 60 years is a growing consensus that one cannot simply ascertain and assert the domestic nature of the origin of Christian worship and imagined correlating aesthetic judgements.

Liturgical scholarship has advanced not simply in the ambit of historical research, but also in the application of phenomenology, anthropology, ritual studies, and related fields. Even should one suppose that the early Christian Eucharist was more domestic in nature, that fact alone makes no claim as to why this should or must be the case today. Through the lenses of other fields there is a wider appreciation in liturgical studies of the polyvalent function of church buildings as places of liturgical prayer, private devotion, community identity and solace, of culture, craftsmanship, and arts, as well as being thin spaces of encounter with the transcendent. ⁷ What is unclear in the opening essay of Shaping the Assembly is an articulated appreciation that the space that shapes worship is all these things, and that the individual and gathered community worship in the intersection of these realities, not in spite of them. Indeed one is reminded of these various interactions by the oft used quote of Sir Winston Churchill in October 1943 on the rebuilding of the House of Commons which were destroyed in the bombing of May 1941: ‘We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.’

This limited theo-aesthetic presented in the opening pages of the book gives a hint to much of what is to follow in succeeding essays. Though there is no editorial coherence between chapters, or even in content, this view of liturgy as a domestic act and the assertion that ‘we do not need churches . . . [but] we need assembly places’ is echoed by other authors within the volume as well at a type of transparent overlay, perhaps less seen, but present. ⁸ Thomas Whelan’s rambling essay, including commentary on everything from liturgical consultants to fire alarms, delineates the character of the ‘worship area’ as a type of egalitarian hall that eschews division of space according to liturgical ministries. ⁹ Joseph Grayland’s essay speaks of a ‘House for Liturgy’ extolling the merits of domestic intimacy, accessibility, and flexibility. ¹⁰ The re-print of Richard Hurley’s essay on the Eucharist Room at Carlow characteristically basks in the idea of familial sharing, domestic environments, poverty, and authenticity. ¹¹ The final essay by Richard Giles returns to the ‘simple room of Carlow’ extolling in a nostalgic fit the past search for ‘new ways of being Church’ during the time of the Second Vatican Council. Here a ‘room,’ ‘deceptively simple and unassuming,’ with ‘decoration and symbolism kept to a minimum,’ is said to be the ideal of the ‘noble simplicity’ sought by the Council. ¹² Aside from the fact that the Council spoke of noble beauty (SC124) and not simplicity within the context of architecture and art, the reader will find few new or fresh insights in the aforementioned essays. ¹³

Those interested in liturgical art and architecture will probably find themselves ill content with the reheated arguments and solutions put forward, finding serious consideration of decades of sensitive liturgical work balancing pastoral practice, liturgical developments, insights from scenographic studies, and competent liturgical design work not beholden to reductive arguments of church-as-family-room, absent. Perhaps where the work is the weakest, not only in the above-mentioned essays but as a whole, is in its lack of something approaching an anthropology of the sacred woven throughout. Declaring not only that, but how the sacred appears in human life requires acknowledgement of and exploration of the sacred in addition to human experience. A credible phenomenological description of the human encounter with the divine that necessarily undergirds any vision of liturgical action, and without which claims regarding worship, what it is and what it is not, how it functions and how it does not, must consider both the divine and human aspect of experience. ¹⁴ Too often however liturgical theology can content itself with being prescriptive and conceptual, taking no account of actual human experience and perception of the divine, and indeed trying to dictate what experience should be. The problem is hinted at on page 223 of Shaping the Assembly when Tom Elich writes that ‘liturgy is a corporate action that admits no spectators, even engaged spectators.’ But the reality is our theology needs to grapple with those who ‘don’t play the game’ to be an authentic theology. For the fact is, to the consternation and contradiction of pastors, academics and practitioners, millions experience liturgy as fruitful private prayer, and millions do not find ‘whiteness: at one time joyful and bright, cool and empty’ as the prescribed, nor preferred, aesthetic conducive to prayer. ¹⁵ This means something. Our locating of the sacred must account for divine prerogative and human experiential freedom. ¹⁶

Helpfully therefore, following the opening essay and its insistence upon the domestic nature of liturgy and a correlating domestic architectural environment as the benchmark for the theological ethos of reformed liturgy, Christopher Irvine offers a differing view of liturgical space, one that explores the role of architecture in shaping experiences of transcendence. Unfortunately, the two initial essays are simply juxtaposed rather than being brought together in dialogue. Nonetheless, Irvine strikes several challenging notes to the overall ethos of Shaping the Assembly. He suggests that a church building is more than a convenient and utilitarian meeting place, asserting that the church building is a sign of God’s presence in the world. ¹⁷ It is also a means by which the worshiper arrives at spiritual experience. In his words, the building should help the congregation ‘step out beyond’ themselves. ¹⁸ In probably one of the rarer moments of astuteness in the book, Irvine writes, ‘Without denying the validity of [the] reforming agenda of facilitating the active participation of worshippers in the liturgy, the question of the relation between form and function in our church buildings needs a more nuanced, and, I might also add here, a more historically responsible attitude towards our church building.’ ¹⁹ Indeed Irvine’s essay is one of the few that seeks to draw insights from the broader history of church architecture and worship and bring them into dialogue regarding liturgical action. In so doing he identifies the hoped-for manner in which the liturgical environment is not simply construed as an ambivalent or neutral space for worship, but how such environments participate themselves in raising the community’s ‘hearts in prayer and praise.’ ²⁰ Irvine is not afraid to invoke the place of the church’s worship as the ‘house of God,’ as the location of encounter with the sacred.

What becomes apparent in Irvine’s essay is the essential role architectural and artistic aesthetics have in shaping the assembly’s experience of the divine at worship. To Irvine’s way of thinking, the elements of light and volume become ‘signs of transcendence’ speaking both to the nature of God and the liturgy, yet readily admitting that how they inculcate a sense of otherness outstrips any single form or arrangement. ²¹ While Irvine’s essay introduces the importance of aesthetics, the reader notes that it is a theme largely absent from the book as a whole. Aside from the penchant for domestic aesthetics already detailed above, there is unfortunately no essay in the book that focuses solely upon the function of aesthetics within liturgy, nor the development of a critical eye so necessary to the competent shaping of liturgical art and architecture. The exclusion of the topic is remarkable given the general agreement in contemporary liturgical method that architecture and the arts are essential to the integrity of rites. ²² But the oversight is simply inexplicable even from the point of view of anthropology and pop culture. We live in a visually saturated culture and are a creative species, we are obsessed about looking and seeing, creating and making. Indeed Jann Weaver argues that ‘Worship is a liturgical form or art [. . .]. In Christian worship we impose a liturgical structure to peel back the layers of the texts to encounter God’s presence more fully. With art, imposing a corresponding structure of liturgy can also peel back the layers to enable us to see God more wholly.’ ²³ Thankfully the reader of Shaping the Assembly will find a similarly well articulated, but all too brief, foray into the topic in James Sabak’s essay as he discusses ‘environment as facilitation of encounter.’ ²⁴ Here one finds in the book a rare unmined vein of gold for aesthetic understanding: ‘encounter begins with space itself,’ the author writes, ‘[with] it’s shape and character.’ ²⁵ I would want to add not simply space but all that it contains. Considering a space’s or object’s character is to consider its aesthetic qualities. As Sabak so importantly writes, the qualities of a liturgical environment ‘can either impede or foster’ the encounter between God and human beings. ²⁶ They are far from neutral conditions.

But the limited engagement in the text regarding aesthetics is also played out visually within the book. Since this is a book that speaks about environment for worship, one would expect images of the finest exemplaries of the most recent architectural and artistic work which illustrates the 19 authors’ primary points. The selection of images however remains ambiguous. A number of photos show dated examples of previously renovated spaces, which while considered by to be ‘ideal’ in terms of liturgical function by the respective authors, remain quite poor nonetheless in terms of being exemplars of architectural and design excellence, including the chapel of St Mary’s Abbey and the Carlow Liturgical Institute. ²⁷ Other images, although representing liturgical spaces that both work well for the reformed liturgy and have aesthetic resonance including St Dunstan’s Liverpool and the Episcopal Cathedral in Philadelphia, are already thoroughly represented in previous literature and so bring little new to the essays. ²⁸ The images found in Joseph Grayland’s essay have a commendable focused didactic purpose exploring seating arrangement of the assembly, but offer nothing that has not already been seen in Liturgy Training Publication’s Meeting House Essays series published in the 1980s and 1990s or even Liturgical Arts published from 1931 to 1971. ²⁹ In a few cases one questions the very purpose of publishing some of the images, as in the architectural elevation found on page 46 that to the quick pass of the eye seems like a black box, or the above garage ‘prayer room’ on page 156 where a car in the drive captures more attention than the chapel’s supposed architectural character. More successful are the images included in Tom Elich’s essay on Liturgy in Australian Churches which focuses on more recently designed buildings, though the essay is more descriptive of the spaces than evaluative. ³⁰ A greater attention to the latter would have added a further welcomed dimension to the essay assisting the reader to learn even more from the photos.

So what is fresh in Shaping the Assembly? The stand out essay is clearly George Guiver’s review of the Community of the Resurrection’s monastery church at Mirfield, UK. The essay is conversational in tone yet full of wisdom and insight evidencing a deep sense of liturgical spirituality. The essay hopefully expands public knowledge of a more recent, lesser internationally known, successful reordering of a church. The project, as Guiver himself argues, is at once respectful of the heritage of the building, but also competently incorporates adaptations made to the space in line with contemporary liturgical practise, while embracing a fine and appropriate sense of contemporary design aesthetic. The essay takes the reader through the primary considerations the community faced when renovating the building, but is also a type of guided tour of the project itself. To this extent, the photos accompanying the essay sit well with the text allowing one to read and see together, as well as providing some sense of the character of the building and its aesthetic ethos. But beyond introducing the monastic community’s refurbished church building, the text includes a number of excellent insights without being pedantic or prescriptive about them.

There is a clear understanding and respect for the power of place and architecture from the outset of the essay, both as a ‘servant’ of the liturgy, but in their own right as well: ‘Push open a door and go into the unfolding space beyond and you are taken over. When I am in a church I feel it with my pores, breathe its air, its sounds, its smells. In the promptings of my senses pick up there is the most unfathomable sensation, a sense of being-somewhere, in an environment and at its mercy.’ ³¹ Each building has its genius, the author notes, and how the building is treated and used can either kill or liberate that spirit. The essential point is liturgical space is not simply a neutral space of human acting. To this end Guiver warns of the great interest in the secular use of buildings for art exhibitions, markets, sit-down meals, coffee bars, stalls and activities, noting that however desirable it is for a church to be outward facing ‘we are not always so good on the fine-tuning. The divine voice in a building can be lost’ when spaces of worship are used as ‘mere venue.’ ³² Indeed, the essay closes with the unapologetic admonition: ‘I would go as far as to say that church buildings are part of the Gospel. Christ’s good news is by explicit intention for real human beings, and there is a profound instinct in human beings for special places.’ ³³

Notably, the essay also helpfully re-introduces and broadens the understanding that liturgical space is not simply an envelope or wrapper for activity, liturgical or otherwise. ³⁴ Church buildings have a formative capacity that is liturgical but also more broadly humanizing. To this end Guiver notes that a major intention of the monks during the renovation was to ‘avoid the mediocrity’ that characterizes so many churches, and thereby give an example that others may follow. But this is not simply a liturgical concern. In one of the most provocative phrases of the entire book Guiver writes, ‘Formation is needed in training of eyes and expectations, not to make people churchy-arty, but as a contribution to our society, holding up standards of care about how our humanity is expressed, and, for Christians, how our faith is rejoiced in. Today we often try too hard to make worship enthusiastic—this is partly because the worship-space has not been enabled to do its important work for us. In a good church interior whose genius affects people, you don’t need to try so hard in worship.’ ³⁵ Embedded within this simple phrase is a clear understanding of the humanizing role of culture, which ecclesial art and architecture represent. ³⁶ It might be said that just as Sacrocantum Concillium §9 asserts that ‘the sacred liturgy does not exhaust the entire activity of the Church,’ so too liturgy does not exhaust the entire nature of a worship space. Thus the author suggests that the ‘church building of the future’ needs to take art and architecture ‘more seriously’ so as to awaken artistic sensibilities and expectations. ³⁷

The other learnable moment within the essay is the organic manner in which the embodiment is spoken of. The reality is that the liturgical reform movement has (too) often related spatial considerations of church buildings to ritual enactment under the guise of embodiment. At this point in post-conciliar liturgical reform, conversation regarding embodiment now tends to come across as directive and rubrical. The congregation’s bodily presence and participation in worship is reduced to instructions about standing, sitting, kneeling, walking here, gathering there, directionality, as well as prohibitions about what is not to be done. Endless conversations and chapters on liturgical space programming foresee ‘shaping space’ to force kinetic behaviour all in the name of what a supposedly ideal enactment of a particular rite demands. ³⁸ Certainly the performative aspects of rites involve embodiment in as much as they involve movement but the point has become stale, both in terms of what it means for architecture, and the understanding of embodiment this propensity towards rubrification portrays.

What George Guiver’s essay helps to remind us of is the serendipitous, artistic, and more expansive reality of embodiment. At the outset of the essay it is immediately clear that embodiment is a unitive sensorial experience of touch, smell, sound, taste and movement that becomes spiritual experience. He laments ‘over-mentalized’ Christianity and speaks of the need to ‘rediscover bodily practices in prayer and the imaginative use of space.’ ³⁹ He proposes buildings of discovery that coax people from their seats, writing that ‘the trail to God is often waiting to be blazed by our bodies.’ ⁴⁰ The insight contained in these words to be further explored is the role that space, and therefore architecture, plays in giving rise to our embodiment through the rapport between bodily experience, aesthetic apprehensions, and emotions provoked by the spaces we inhabit. ⁴¹ Space brings about our embodiment. ⁴² We embody space only secondarily, and even less so by programming movement within it. Guiver’s comments invite liturgical studies back to a classical sense of the ‘sensible theological moment’ through a renewed appreciation of the concept of spiritual senses, that is the way the human body apprehends divine revelation that is not cognitive. ⁴³ The liturgical space of celebration that seeks to be a sensible theological moment will be approached far more in a scenographic sense, the mise-en-scene of worship that seeks to encourage a certain total embodiment in an overarching aesthetic situation, rather than a functionally programmed built-environment only, or primarily, interested in ritually dictated movement. ⁴⁴ In this light, we can say that too often architectural considerations of embodiment are reduced to orientations, sightlines, and pathways in a supposedly neutral volume. This essay stands out as having very unassumingly distilled more fundamental lessons from contemporary liturgical studies combined with a lived liturgical ethos that incidentally strikes an inquisitorial tone before some of the more aged and atrophied liturgical assumptions present in the book, and as a caution to some of the premises found in various other essays focused more upon the church building itself.

Two further noteworthy essays in the collection are those by Richard Vosko and Laura Hellsten. Vosko’s essay, like many others in the collection, is too brief to say something substantial. Yet the contribution is the only one that goes out of its way to speak of the contemporary global context and social trends in which the church finds itself today, thereby lending it a certain freshness and relevance. ⁴⁵ As such, it is a helpful reminder that the church’s worship is acted upon by forces that it seldom controls. But this is not necessarily a conflictual reality. Vosko suggests a congruence between society’s struggles with relationally and fragmentation and the manner in which the liturgy and a building’s design and ordering are meant to foster relationships and encounter, human and divine. ⁴⁶ At the same time these trends also highlight growing questions in the West regarding where the church worships, as gone is the assumption a community can sustain a stand alone church, and how the church worships, as technology shifts our understanding of place and embodiment with the ever growing use of social media and virtual technology.

The outlook of the essay is also significant in that it hints at the need in an age of flux to be open to change and to be discerning regarding authentic progress made. Vosko offers a useful paragraph in this respect suggesting certain ‘Post-Conciliar designs that still matter.’ ⁴⁷ Some essential benchmarks are highlighted: that the design of the liturgical environment is arranged for the celebration of the Eucharist and sacraments along with the necessary elements, such as font, confessional, ambo, altar; that the design treats worshipers as celebrants and not spectators; and, that the altar and ambo focus the congregation’s worship. What was not mandated by the various ecclesial documents of the Conciliar reform was particular designs, styles, or aesthetics as they related to buildings or liturgical furnishings. ⁴⁸ Keeping sight of this fact is a helpful corrective to arguments found elsewhere in the book that appear overly dependent upon previous interpretations of the liturgical renewal around the time of the Council that now seem closed to the possibility of new liturgical insights, shifting cultural sensitivities and needs, and emerging ecclesial priorities, which may variously appear progressive or conservative.

Finally, the chapter on dance by Laura Hellsten opens further horizons to consider regarding liturgical worship. Although the essay escapes the grasp of the organizing premise offered by the book’s title Shaping the Assembly: How Our Buildings Form Us in Worship, as the topic has very little to do with the impact of buildings upon the worshiping community, it is one of the few essays that focuses solely upon the human body in liturgy. ⁴⁹ As the author states, dancing in churches is for many a ‘foreign element to Christian liturgical life.’ ⁵⁰ Luckily the author does not propose that we all begin dancing. Rather the essay serves as a reminder that liturgy and transcendent experience is highly informed by cultural and social experience; There are many Christian traditions such as Pentecostalism where dance is appropriate, and many Christian cultures where dance is an organic aspect of worship that should be welcomed as ‘proper worship or liturgy,’ but not emulated via cultural appropriation, which Hellsten warns can quickly become entertainment and amusement. ⁵¹ Having read the essay, the reader in a broader frame of reference, might consider the implications of globality and multiculturality for liturgy, as well as considering how both liturgical and non-liturgical churches might begin exploring topics of embodiment, aesthetics, and liturgical space together sharing insights and finding common ground.

In the end Shaping the Assembly: How Our Buildings Form Us in Worship is a jarring read in style, tone, and content as essays haltingly drift one into the other. After reading the book one supposes that the title was meant to do the heavy lifting of trying to give some conceptual unity to the work serving as a generalized theme to which the essays relate. Some authors do engage ideas around how buildings impact liturgical worship and congregations, others less so. Hence the 15 essays come across more like a random collection of each author’s ideas, some essays lifting the others up, some dragging the others down.

But I return to where I began. For the person even minimally conversant in ecclesial art or architecture or liturgics, academic or popular, many of the book’s ideas will feel as if they are collapsing under the weight of their history lacking a sense of critical analysis, reformulation, or updating—at least to the extent of producing a different result. To use a musical analogy, Shaping the Assembly largely comes across as a sampling of liturgical greatest hits from the 1950s to the 1990s. One wonders where the experience of the black church and the emerging church is? Where are the insights of Eastern Christianity culturally, liturgically, and aesthetically? Where is the engagement with legitimate insights raised by the self-proclaimed ‘reform of the reform’? Where are the examples of some of the very fine contemporary churches being built today throughout Italy? As it stands, the collection comes across as a largely white, anglophone, euro-academic view of liturgical reform of the past decades that struggles to say new things. Certainly there are touchstones of liturgical renewal that, to use the language of Richard Vosko, ‘still matter,’ and which are not in dispute. But the Church is to proclaim the Gospel afresh to each generation, the arts continually generate and create, and our places in the world continue to change spiritually. For these reasons, reviewing the history of liturgical reform as it relates to places of worship one would likely find greater insight in the original older sources which are referenced in this book. Searching for new substantial insights gleaned from contemporary liturgical studies is probably more easily accomplished by turning to some of the various authors’ more comprehensive works, or other books on liturgical art and architecture already well represented on the market.