Copyright: © 2004 Paul F. Bosch.
This document may be freely reproduced for non-commercial purposes with credit to the author and mention of the Lift Up Your Hearts web site http://www.worship.ca/ as the source.

I was ordained, now almost fifty years ago, having received a call to serve as Assistant Pastor in a large parish in a medium-sized city in central Pennsylvania -- a part of the American Northeast, as Franklin Clark Fry famously liked to say, "where Lutherans are the densest". The congregation, in those days, numbered over 2000 souls: a big parish, by any consideration.

I arrived, a downy-cheeked post-adolescent fresh out of Seminary, shortly after the congregation had begun an enormous capital funds drive to finance the building of a new church. The old church had been built at the turn of the 20th Century, and was in need of significant repairs. And it had been built on the old "Akron plan". The new building would be more "churchly", the professional fund-raiser assured us.

The "Akron plan", as it was called even then, featured an interior that was wider than it was long, with pews that swept in a full half-circle around a raised platform positioned against the long "east" wall. The platform was thrust shallowly into the assembly, and altar, pulpit, lectern, sedilia, and even font were all located here. Rather than providing a central aisle, the interior plan divided the assembly into thirds, two aisles partitioning the pews into three more or less equal pie-slices. Further: The nave, such as it was, featured a raked floor, descending moderately from west, at the entrance, to east, at the platform.

A local joke held that you could always identify the pastor of our church: His neck muscles would be over-developed from having to scan his congregation, during preaching, by a full one-hundred-eighty degrees.

In contrast, the new church about to be built was designed following the principles of Lutheranism's somewhat delayed "Oxford movement". It was to be superficially "modern" in materials and decor, but beneath the surface it was to be basically "neo-Gothic": long and narrow from west to east, a central aisle, a raised chancel in the east with divided choir, pulpit and lectern matched to north and south at chancel's edge, like a Rorschach. And an east-wall altar. "Churchly" indeed. Lacking only a rood screen!

Suggestions from me and others succeeded in talking the architect into moving the altar some few feet from the east wall, but not enough to allow a comfortable or graceful versus populum presidency. To this day I can recall with embarrassment the professional fund-raiser shaming me at a congregational meeting. He apparently sensed that my smart-mouthed observations were threatening the success of his capital funds drive. His remarks worked; I shut my mouth henceforth, and supported the funds drive faithfully. My teeth had been pulled.

But at the same time I was no fan of the Akron plan, either. I can remember being shamed yet again, by a loyal parishioner, after I had remarked in a sermon that the Akron plan betrayed a "fuzzy" faith in its builders. I cannot remember how I came to that conclusion, but I distinctly remember that that was the word I used. And my critic, a dear old lady whom I loved, reproached me after my sermon more in sorrow than in censure. Shamed again!

Anyhow, the Akron plan, then and for years later, struck me as grotesque in a church. It was more fitting, I felt, as a setting for a lecture than for prayer. Indeed, much of Protestant worship, in those days, had more the character of moralizing declamation than of worship: an almost exclusively top-of-the-head experience, innocent of incarnation or action or sacrament or "molecules". See Essays 75 and 77.

Consequently, I felt, the assembly was encouraged by the space arrangements to think of itself as an audience, not a congregation. Worship was not participatory, the Akron plan seemed to say, it was presentational. The man on the platform --it was always a male-- had something to tell you, to present to you. Something you didn't have, and needed.

But now? Now I'm older and wiser. (Hah!) Maybe that Akron plan should be reconsidered. Maybe it wasn't so bad after all. Maybe it wasn't fuzzy faith that built it.

Consider: The Akron plan did have some good things going for it. That half-circle sweep of seats allowed you to look another worshipper in the eye. It allowed you to notice if Aunt Minnie wasn't there in her accustomed station. Was she ill? You were conscious, in that kind of place, that however Other our God might be, however transcendent and apart from our perception, the Holy also dwells among us, and in us, as an immanent reality. Luther would have liked that: the presence of God in the person across from you.

In short, that half-a-radius of seats had the effect of building community among us. And it had the effect of teaching the Immanence of the Sacred, of holding up the here-and-nowness of the Holy. It was perhaps unconscious and unintended, but still it was effectual. You couldn't avoid its effect. It worked its work in you.

Granted, many parishioners in those days didn't like to look at others in the face. Many still don't today. A true sense of community, of the Immanence of God, of the Holy as here-and-now --that can be threatening. It can scare you. See Moses and the burning bush. But it's maybe what we need today, more than a teaching about Transcendence.

If you want Transcendence, if you want a sense that the Holy is far away, removed from our perceptions, unlike our highest or our best imaginings, then I suppose you build a neo-Gothic building: long and narrow, everyone focused up there and far away, the Presider perhaps with back to the people (the people with backs to each other !), the Holy way out there ahead and beyond, beyond even the east wall. That kind of sermon in stone might have made some sense in an earlier age.

But if you want Immanence, and community, a sense that God is with us, a sense that the Holy has pitched tent among us, and in us, intends to work in us, and through us, and by means of us, perhaps then you'll build something like that old Akron plan.

No, I still don't like that platform, and its associations with the lecture hall. And I don't like that raked floor, nor those restrictive pews bolted to the deck. I don't like each of those important architectural "signs" --font, altar, ambo, sedilia-- all crowded into a tiny space up front. See my Essays, above, on each.

But the people arranged in ways that force or foster a human community, a notion of God at work in us? THAT I like.

Transcendence? Immanence? I suppose you could make a case for one or the other, depending on your sense of the world you find yourself in. I've never seen a worship space that manages to signal both. Have you?

Martin Luther notes the tension between the two pretty nicely in his Small Catechism: He says, in interpreting the Second Petition of the Lord's Prayer: "The Kingdom of God comes indeed of itself, without our prayer..." That's Transcendence, the Holy working its work in this world, with or without you or me. However, Luther moves on to Immanence in the second half of his sentence, to remind you that Transcendence is not the end of the story: "...but we pray in this petition that it may come also to us."