The assembly room for worship obviously
should not be used for other purposes; all its suggestions and
associations should be of one sort and that sort the highest. Quite
aside from the question of taste, it is psychologically indefensible
to use the same building, and especially the same room in the
building, for concerts, for picture shows, for worship. Here we at
once create a distracted consciousness; we dissipate attention; we
deliberately make it harder for men and women to focus upon one, and
that the most difficult, if the most precious, mood.
For the same reason, the physical form of the room should be one
that does not suggest either the concert hall or the playhouse, but
suggests rather a long and unbroken ecclesiastical tradition. Until
the cinema was introduced into worship, we were vastly improving in
these respects, but now we are turning the morning temple into an
evening showhouse. I think we evince a most impertinent familiarity
with the house of God! And too often the church is planned so that
it has no privacies or recesses, but a hideous publicity pervades its
every part. We adorn it with stenciled frescoes of the same patterns
which we see in hotel lobbies and clubs; we hang up maps behind the
reading desk; we clutter up its platform with grand pianos.
It is a mere matter of good taste and good psychology to begin our
preparation for a ministry of worship by changing all this.
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