This Week in Texas Methodist History  August 25

Continuing our series in honor of 175 years of Methodism in Brenham

How we choose to organize the space in which we worship says a lot about us.   Methodism grew like a brush fire in 19^th century America, and the main engine of that growth was a movement called revivalism.  The era of revivals began with outdoor communion services by college students in western North Carolina, but soon swept the frontier with camp meetings under brush arbors.  The meetings centered on powerful preaching calling upon sinners to repent of their sins and accept the pardon and mercy that God offered.  The appeals were quite emotional and filled with warning of the fate of those who did not repent.  A 19^th century Methodist revival was a noisy affair.  Methodists were known as “Shouting Methodists” because many of them were so overcome with either the despair of eternal damnation or the joy of salvation though God’s mercy, that they could not contain themselves.

When Methodists became prosperous enough to construct their own houses of worship, they brought their revivals indoors.  The preaching was still the central part of the service, and the pulpit was placed in the center of chancel.

The highest architectural expression of the emphasis on preaching was the Akron Plan church, so named because the first one was built in Akron, Ohio.  It featured a central pulpit with a fan shaped auditorium.  In pre-amplifier days, that structure brought more people closer to the preacher.  It also fit well with other trends.  The late 19^th century was also known as the Sunday School era.  For the first time graded Sunday Schools became common as denominational presses published graded Sunday School literature.  The ends of the fan-shaped auditorium could be isolated with sliding panels to serve as Sunday School rooms and opened to provide addition auditorium seating.   It was also the era of building more churches in cities, and the Akron Plan worked very well because the style could be fit into a city block with the choir and pulpit in a corner.

In 1879 the MECS in Brenham built a magnificent building just south

downtown on Church Street and named it Giddings Memorial. 

Even though it was beautiful, it was snakebit from the start. One Saturday night one of the exterior walls collapsed—foundation problems are nothing new in Brenham. 

Meanwhile the German speaking MEC church built a more modest church building on 4^th Street and worshiped there. 

By the 1930’s the 1879 structure was in really bad shape.  The two congregations, MEC and MECS, merged in 1938—a year before the unification of 1939—and continued to worship in the 4^th Street Church. 

Part of the merger agreement was that the merged congregation would build a new sanctuary in a new location—not previously owned by the predecessor congregations.  Another provision of the merger was that the new church would be built before the 1940 session of Annual Conference to be held in November—a two year lead time.

That deadline was not met, and that delay had a profound effect upon the design of the sanctuary in which we now worship. 

After World War II there was a huge need for new church construction.  Very few churches had been built because of the Depression and World War II, and the churches were growing rapidly because the post-war Baby Boom parents wanted to raise their children in church. Most late 19^th-early 20^th century church buildings were too small and could not be retrofitted with the sound systems and air conditioning now considered necessities. 

There had been a change in church architectural styles.  The Akron Plan was dead.  The post World War II generation of preachers was the first generation of Methodist preachers for whom a seminary education was an expectation.  In the years following 1945 the crop of young preachers who were going to lead the church-building effort had been educated in the historic traditions of our faith.  Many of them wished to re-emphasize the historic emphasis on the sacraments at the expense of preaching.  A more educated, sophisticated clergy was now preaching to a more educated, sophisticated laity and both were somewhat ashamed of their legacy as “Shouting Methodists.” 

In architectural terms, that meant the pulpit was pushed to the side, and the communion table that held the sacraments was made the focal point of the worship space.  Church auditoriums were stretched to create long central aisles appropriate for ritual processions. 

The pastor at Brenham, James Allen Chapman, already had a reputation as the “most high church preacher in the Texas Conference” when he came here.  It would be an understatement to say that he embraced the changes going on in church architecture.  Church architecture was his passion, and he even went to Columbia University for graduate school to study the subject. 

His predecessor, Emmett Dubberly, had tried to move the church, but failed because there was huge division in the church.  Some of the former MECS members wanted to renege on the merger agreement and place the new church back on the lot that had once been their home.  Dubberly could not break the log jam.

Chapman was less diplomatic.  In the “you can’t cook an omelet without breaking some eggs” style, he pushed through the new building plans by driving out some members of one of the factions. 

The church in which we worship shows the mark of the “high church” architectural movement.  You have noted the kneelers in the pews as possibly the only ones you’ve ever seen in a Texas Methodist church, but the kneelers were not the talk of the Conference in 1950.  The most radical “high church” feature was the eternal flame in the chancel (since removed). 

In the late 20^th century the pendulum swung back again.  The blossoming of “contemporary worship” services and the rise of mega-churches pushed architectural styles toward more flexible spaces.  The communion table was de-emphasized and the pulpit and stage for a band returned to prominence.  Rotating seasonal banners rather than timeless stained glass windows became the dominant visual ornamentation.