The Evangelical Covenant Church eschewed traditional church architecture and use of the arts in its beginning. But in the twentieth century, it has produced church buildings built in a variety of architectural styles. Denominational leaders have been influential in the literary and visual arts.
Architecture
The Evangelical Covenant Church was born out of the pietistic renewal movements that swept Sweden in the nineteenth century. It was organized in Sweden in 1878 and in the United States in 1885. Colporteurs distributing tracts and other Christian literature became key links among and between conventicles. Some became gifted preachers. Meeting in homes, halls, and lofts, the setting, often a circle, was open, face to face, and intimate. A place was given to people of low and high birth, tenant and owner, men and women. Great energy, power, and freedom were released, and the emphasis attending a firsthand experience of grace yielded a feeling of immediacy but not necessarily emotionalism.
Early Covenant churches were very simple in design. Often they resembled a rural school building or meeting home. Such simplicity of architecture has several roots. One was legal. Olaf Gabriel Hendengren was a wealthy estate owner and a pietist who built a plain building—his “chapel” as he called it—because he was obliged to design it to be “as unlike the churches as possible.” First built as a house of prayer and study for his workers, it would have run afoul of the law if it had resembled a church. Second, such a structure was an ideal setting for fellowship and encounters with each other in Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit. Third, this differentiation became part of the church’s identity as a “free”—i.e., non-state—church and a place of open fellowship for those who had found new life in Christ. So while the phrase “unlike the churches as possible” originally described a legal circumvention, it soon became common to appropriate such a phrase to show one’s distinction from the Lutheran state church. As such it became an important architectural criterion for Covenant churches.
In the United States, revivalists such as D. L. Moody also made a contribution. Already the emphasis in Covenant life had been placed on reading, discussing, and preaching of Holy Scripture. The pulpit was central and, as Karl Olsson says, the church was a “listening post.” American Covenanters were particularly amenable to the “Akron Plan” or, in some cases, to a design that resembled a tabernacle. The “wrap-around” seating arrangement gathered people close to and around the pulpit. The intimacy of the conventicle was somewhat retained, but the center became a pulpit and preacher. Churches were built to accommodate listeners.
A change in the approach to church architecture took place in the late 1920s in that a few congregations erected buildings of Gothic design and introduced the divided chancel. Stained glass windows began to include more than biblical scenes. Classical symbols now graced newly built churches, introducing a new language into worship, a language addressed to the imagination more than the language of literal, reproductive art. An editorial in the Covenant Companion of this period remarked that older churches were built for evangelistic services, whereas the newer churches attended more to the devotional aspects of worship. It was further contended that the ritualistic churches retained the children better than free-church congregations because the iconoclasm of the latter took away many things that appealed to children.
This development had earlier roots. In 1900 the Covenant’s Committee on Ritual published a volume called Guide to Christian Worship. This volume contended that “the outward form of the worship should be reverent, festive, and beautiful.” Human beings are described as “spiritual-physical beings” who have a continuous interaction between the body and the soul, which are entered through the “Eyegate and Eargate.” The symbols present and the forms used kept the gospel perceivable and concrete, thus avoiding sentimentality and abstraction. Formalities, not formalism, awakened and maintained devotion. Thus, the architectural changes and liturgical developments of this period were a natural outgrowth of a document stressing reverence, festivity, and beauty.
There is, however, no uniformity regarding architectural styles in the Covenant churches. In fact, one can find vigorous discussion as to whether or not a “churchly” building may interfere with outreach to a culture put off by the songs and structures of Zion. The phrase, “as unlike the churches as possible” may again find currency, not because of legal restrictions or antistate church bias, but for cultural reasons. Voiced in particular by the church growth movement and the megachurch philosophy, this phrase is a programmatic criterion used in support of the idea that the alien character of classical church tradition, music, and architecture not only communicates nothing to contemporary Americans but in fact alienates them. Hence the interface between church and culture, in the form of music, buildings, forms of worship, and the nature of church programming is front and center. Churches with memories of the intimacy of the conventicles, the intensity of evangelistic meetings, and also the impingement of the transcendent through the liturgy and architecture in the “liturgical” churches from which they have come, will struggle incessantly with functionalism. The statement issued by the Committee on Ritual in 1900 refused the “functional only” route by granting integrity of its own to symbols, festivity, and beauty. With that, early Covenanters granted an intrinsic ecclesiastical identity to churchly matters for the sake of the gospel and it’s being heard and seen.
Storytelling
Hearing and seeing find expression in an art form intrinsic to pietism, namely testimony and storytelling. In the late 1920s Olga Lindborg (1889–1945), a leader in the educational work of the Covenant, wrote with a sophisticated understanding of the phenomenon of narrative expression in a simple style that gave Sunday School teachers in Covenant churches a highly competent analysis of the power of story and its educational potential. Lindborg pointed out the differences among story, myth, fairy tale, epic, biography, and history. She noted continuities within discontinuities. The hero in a story or epic is a successor to the giant in a fairy tale. What these art forms have in common is that they address the imagination, a most important human faculty. Imaginative people, she argued, are joyous beings, adept at self-expression. Hence she became an advocate of Forebel’s idea that education rests on a law of self-expression and thus contended that handwork needed to be a part of Sunday school teaching. By extension, pageants were also a form of handwork because they were imaginative reconstructions of primal events and experiences; through them, children became a part of the story they heard—in other words, they saw it and felt it. However valuable this was educational, many in the church viewed it as worldly, arguing that if pageants were approved, one could also approve the theater. And if one could use moving pictures in the church, why could one not approve of the moving picture industry? Lindborg found herself in the midst of controversy, engendered in no small way by pietism’s effort to separate from the world. Perhaps its failure to distinguish worldliness from living in the world led to this love/hate relationship with aesthetic expression and consequently to a nearly exclusive emphasis on preaching.
Yet Covenant preachers knew instinctively what Lindborg was exploring in her sophisticated analysis of storytelling. Early Covenant sermons were laden with stories, and conventicles thrived on testimonies of the friendship of God in Jesus Christ with those who were seeking new life and joy. Story writers, said Lindborg, are not in touch with an audience; a storyteller is. Story readers go off alone to read, while a storyteller requires a community. Storytellers are not mere reciters but must appeal to the senses, creating an immediate and interactive event.
Lindborg’s attempt to recognize that human beings respond bodily as well as mentally, imaginatively as well as intellectually, is now bearing fruit elsewhere. Some literature in Covenant history virtually repudiates bodily movement to music. “If the tune moves the feet, it is worldly” is an example of one such negative reaction. But in Covenant churches today one can find some use of liturgical dance, mime, and widespread use of musicals, choral readings, pageants, and audio-visuals. Praise music is accompanied by clapping and movement of feet along with drum, synthesizers, bells, pipe organs, and pianos. Lindborg would agree, I think, with poet and critic John Ciardi that if one asks not so much what but how does a poem mean, one could ask the same about church and education: how a service means is as crucial as what it means. The “how” issue calls for congregational and/or class involvement, and that calls for ritual, carried out in accordance with the gospel. By implication, pastors, and teachers are choreographers, a high art if there ever was one. The gospel story can be danced, mimed, sung, painted, sculpted, and told—one story in multimedia.
Visual Arts
While relying mostly on musical and verbal arts, Covenant’s artistic expression includes painting. Well known is the work of Warner Sallman (1892–1968), whose Head of Christ has been distributed in hundreds of millions of copies. Sallman, who began his career as an illustrator for a fashion magazine, studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and in several Bible institutes. He was advised by a dean to paint a “masculine” Christ, a rugged Christ of the desert, a Christ whose face had a distant gaze, in light of the events of Good Friday. Sallman focused on the meaning of a face, believing it to be the place where person and character are revealed. He often inscribed his work with this text from 2 Corinthians 4:6 (Phillips): “We now can enlighten men only because we can give them the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” The other person whose painting reached a wide audience was Walter Olson (1893–1974). Also trained as an illustrator, Walter Olson became the artist for the well-known Bethel Bible study program for which he rendered many of the epochal events of salvation history in portrait form.
Sallman and Olson are representative of two major emphases of Covenant life and history: the Word of God and the centrality of Christ. Significantly, Sallman’s work is called the Head of Christ. Pietism continually does battle with the tendency to flirt with a “Jesusology,” which promotes a more romantic than the prophetic person of Jesus Christ, in place of a Christology.
The Covenant Archives located at North Park Theological Seminary in Chicago have materials related to Sallman and Olson, as well as bound volumes of the Covenant Companion, Covenant Quarterly, The Children’s Friend, and the Covenant Weekly. Karl Olsson’s By One Spirit (Chicago: Covenant Press) is the definitive history of the Evangelical Covenant Church, which should be read together with Into One Body by the Cross, 2 vols. (Chicago: Covenant Press). “The Mission Covenant Church of Sweden and Art” is published in Gyllene ljus (Stockholm: Verbum). The Covenant Book of Worship of 1964 contains the formative statement of the Covenant Committee on Ritual of 1900.