All right, ladies and gentlemen. It’s time to get serious. 
Jody has shared a church with us.
I have shared a lot of churches with us.
Does anyone else out there have a church to share with us?
Anyone? Anyone?
Jody suggested collecting prettiest and ugliest churches, but perhaps we could come up with some additional categories.
Church That Looks Most Like a Church and Church That Looks Most Like Something Other Than a Church are two which spring immediately to mind, as does Most Ingenious Non-Ecclesial-to-Ecclesial Building Makeover.
Let us reason together. I’m thinking you all could submit links to photos via the comments section for this post, and we could post them. Maybe some web-literate person on the FT staff, by which I mean someone who is not me, could design us a button to go in the sidebar, so that the contest doesn’t get lost in the welter of redemptive consumer goods which are the bread and butter of this site.
Just thinking out loud here . . .
UPDATE: Thank you very much, Nathaniel, for kicking us off. This is a contender for Prettiest Church, Church-Least-Likely-To-Be-Mistaken-For-a-Chick-Fil-A, and many other happy categories, I’m sure.
And here’s another. Does Central Europe mop up the Best Use of Improbable Color Combinations category, or what?
Okay, the rest of you. Don’t be shy.
UPDATE #2:
From The Millinerd: Churches That Make You Uncomfortable aaaaaaaand Best Church Stairs.
Maclin Horton offers a famous contender in the “Desperate Churches for Desperate People” Category.
Reader RS gives us the new chapel at Thomas Aquinas College as an example of a rare “Beautiful Church Built in the Last Ten Years,” as well as interior and exterior views of his own parish church.
Joseph gives us an example of Expensive Postmodern Bad.
Keep ‘em coming.
UPDATE: Active Categories
Prettiest Church
Ugliest Church
Church That Looks Most Like a Church
Church That Looks Most Like Something Other Than a Church
Best/Worst Non-Ecclesial-to-Ecclesial Building Makeover
Best/Worst Architectural Feature (stairs, doors, etc)
Farthest Outside the Comfort Zone
Desperate Churches
Got a new category? Add it now.
July 29th, 2009 | 10:23 am
[...] at Icons and Curiosities, Sally asks the rest of us to join in her and Jody’s churchfest. This morning my friend Matt Alderman inadvertently answered the call at the Shrine of the Holy [...]
July 29th, 2009 | 1:00 pm
There is also the hideous “Church which Most Resembles a Correctional Facility.” That is a category that came to my mind when visiting a town in northern Wisconsin, which I shall not name, in which the parish church’s cement block facade and extremely narrow windows bore an uncanny resemblance to my home county’s jail.
And, btw, they don’t build jails like they used to, either. While visiting the same town, we made a jaunt over to Minnesota to drive by the prison in Stillwater, since I’m quite a fan of Bl. Solanus Casey and wanted to see where he had once worked as a guard. The ‘old’ prison was splendidly imposing…inspiring the proper awe and desire to avoid incarceration.
July 29th, 2009 | 2:36 pm
[...] addition to the church challenge, and one which I was fortunate enough to visit earlier this month, is the Mariaczka Basilica on the [...]
July 29th, 2009 | 2:57 pm
OK, Ellyn, now I’m thinking I need to go take a picture of our local jailhouse. It’s not much of a deterrent, visually, and the big gaps in the fence around the exercise yard don’t help much.
July 29th, 2009 | 5:29 pm
I sheepishly put forward the following nominations for the “churches that make you uncomfortable” category:
http://northamericanchurches.blogspot.com/2009/03/cathedrals-gone-wild.html
On the more wholesome side, I nominate Pugin’s Cheadle for the “best church stairs” distinction:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/millinerd/3744467981/in/set-72157621775829452/
July 30th, 2009 | 10:10 am
[...] haven’t forgotten I&C Church Challenge, however. The Millinerd has contributed some images, and I’ll post the links in an update to [...]
July 30th, 2009 | 6:53 pm
My parish’s new website has removed the old photograph and history of the church building, but a sketch of the exterior is still in the corner:
http://christchurchparishacc.org/
Several pictures of the interior are also on our website:
http://christchurchparishacc.org/images/CCPInside/inside_ccp.htm
http://christchurchparishacc.org/images/CCPOrgan/CCPOrgan.jpg
July 31st, 2009 | 1:24 pm
These photos don’t do justice to the grandeur of my alma mater’s new Chapel, but they should be sufficient to make Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity Chapel a contender for Most-Beautiful-Church-Built-in-the-Last-10-Years:
http://thomasaquinas.edu/development/campaign/chapel/name.html
Be sure to look at all 4 pages of photos.
July 31st, 2009 | 11:21 pm
I’d like to suggest another category, something like Desperate Churches for Desperate People, like the Universal United House of Prayer, which gave Buddy Miller the title for a great album.
There used to be one on the north end of Birmingham, a dismal little concrete block building sitting in a wilderness of dirty gravel and pavement: the Fultondale House of Deliverance. Unfortunately I don’t have a picture of it. But I expect some people found deliverance there.
August 1st, 2009 | 12:04 am
Heh. Yes, Memphis is full of those, too. Amazing what you can do with a concrete-block building and the words “Deliverance,” “Tabernacle,” “Gospel,” “Anointed,” “Praise,” “Temple,” and “New.”
We used to live two doors down from a Pentecostal church called — more simply — New Life Holiness Church. They were more upmarket, being housed in a former Church of the Nazarene building; a former student of my husband’s was actually saved in that building, she said, when it was the Church of the Nazarene. In the summertime the Holiness church ran a camp, really a daycare, whose activities included forced marches around our very pleasant but dull 1950’s-vintage suburban neighborhood. That was the only time we ever saw the 70 or so kids who attended the camp. I have no idea what they did the rest of the time, but for 70 kids, they were really quiet.
Anyway, great category. I need to get busy updating this post.
August 1st, 2009 | 12:07 am
By the way, the picture appended to this post is of what I guess is a church down the street from my current house. I haven’t observed anyone coming or going from this one, though, unlike the Way and Truth Restoration Center, which seems frequently busy, even at night.
August 1st, 2009 | 11:15 pm
[...] liberated to browse our current contenders for “Churches That Make People Uncomfortable,” “Desperate Churches for Desperate [...]
August 3rd, 2009 | 1:39 pm
[...] take the I&C Church Challenge. Comments [...]
August 3rd, 2009 | 3:50 pm
There should be a special mention for churches that
1. Cost a LOT of money;
2. Were going for some flavor of ‘breathtakingly modern’ and;
3. Are just so wrong as churches.
here’s one of my ‘favorites’ of the above:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_of_Saint_Mary_of_the_Assumption
What the pictures fail to capture is the oppressive weight of the interior – these HUGE masses of concrete sitting on little points feel like they could crush you at any moment. And there’s just nothing about the design that says anything about ‘church’ or God or anything religious, apart from afterthoughts like crosses stuck here and there.
One can imagine a major appliance convention taking place inside as easily as Mass.
The new Oakland cathedral fits this description, too. I tried to like it. But the though: ‘$179 MILLION’ kept intervening.
August 10th, 2009 | 6:36 pm
If I had to put my parish church in a category, it’d be “least expensive.” The most I’ve heard we paid is fifteen dollars. I’ve also heard five dollars. That included the windows. It did not include the pulpit, the Altar stone, the organ, or the land under the church. (They dismantled the building and shipped it across the San Francisco Bay.) Yes, that leaves a lot out about which I don’t know one way or the other.
The former owner must not have been using the building when we bought it. There was an owl living inside. (I think this is one reason for the Parish’s continuing devotion to St. Francis.) I will not argue, however, that temporary use as an owl barn (or barge freight) qualifies the church for the Best Non-Ecclesial-to-Ecclesial Building Makeover category.
I agree with Joseph about new St. Mary’s. It is especially disconcerting here in earthquake country.
August 11th, 2009 | 8:46 am
That’s a great story. Maybe a church-to-church makeover category . . . ?
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