Modern Church’s Non-Gothic Tale : Glendale Methodists Fete 25 Years of ‘New’ Sanctuary

Only an architect with the patience of Job could send back his plans to a church building committee a dozen times, knowing he would earn 8% of the cost of the work, instead of the customary 12%-15%.

And only a pastor with the eloquence of Paul could convince his congregation that it must forsake its beloved Gothic style and venture boldly into the fold of “modernism,” where the architect led.

Twenty-five years ago this week, architect, minister and congregation worshipped in the poured-concrete and concrete-block First United Methodist Church of Glendale for the first time.

Standing beneath a slab roof that the Glendale building superintendent called “revolutionary in design” when it passed a live-load test, and surrounded by 68-foot-high columns, gigantic slices of leaded glass and behemoth, water-stained concrete sections, the Rev. Everett W. Palmer preached from the “Moby Dick” pulpit designed by the architect, Ralph C. Flewelling.

Years of Fund Raising

Many more than the 1,300 people the sanctuary was meant to hold had crowded into the new pews, women in their Jackie Kennedy-like pillbox hats and men in narrow ties. Twelve years of fund raising were almost behind the 3,000-member congregation, for only the tall glass doors on the east and west sides of the sanctuary remained to be decorated.

An outlay of $1.5 million covered purchase of the property at Kenwood Street and Broadway, the $750,000 church, an organ and assistance to new Methodist churches in other communities.

Local Methodists had not constructed a major sanctuary since the 1920s, when architect John C. Austin built two in the Spanish-Renaissance style for Los Angeles and Pasadena. Glendale First Methodist, organized since 1903, had favored the Gothic style from the time their second church was built in 1917.

After World War II, when the congregation had outgrown the space, it could no longer afford to think Gothic. Dreams of pointed arches and rose windows were banished with the realities of construction costs. According to Leonard A. Ellison, co-chairman of two pledge drives, a Gothic design by the architectural firm of Frick & Frick would have cost twice as much as the congregation had pledged for the sanctuary.

In Glendale, as in the rest of the country, the Gothic style did not outlive its most vocal advocate, Ralph Adams Cram, who died in 1942.

When the Rev. Donald Locher, the present pastor, steps up to the pulpit today, he will acknowledge those who took part in the sanctuary planning, then move on to what he feels the pulpit is intended for: “To inspire, to educate, to make the church aware of the world situation, to move against all forms of evil and to meet the changing needs of the world.”

Member of Church

The church’s architect died in 1975, and Palmer, the minister, who changed his allegiance from Gothic to modern, had passed away four years before. Yet, enough church members and architectural partners remain to piece together the story of this church, whose style had initially shocked Glendale’s citizenry.

Architect Walter Moody, a member of the church since the 1930s, met architect Flewelling, son of a Methodist minister, when they worked together on a Navy housing project in Long Beach.

After World War II, they formed a partnership, and by the time they won the Glendale church project, Flewelling and Moody, Planning, Architecture and Engineering, had completed $70 million worth of schools, banks, city halls and performing arts facilities. Master planning had been done for Jet Propulsion Laboratory, USC School of Medicine and several school districts.

Built 11 Scale Models

The Methodist roots of Flewelling, and Moody’s membership in the church, helped them obtain the Glendale job once the Frick & Frick scheme had been rejected as too costly. Even with Flewelling’s educational background--he had been a graduate student of Cram at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology--he could not produce a Gothic building for 1,300 parishioners with a budget of $750,000.

According to his son, Ralph F. Flewelling, the second-generation architect now in charge of the firm, “Dad went through a long song and dance with the congregation. Between three or four of us in the office, including him, we built 11 scale models that reflected the revisions. When the design was put up to a vote, it won by about a two-point majority.”

“There is no question that some were unhappy enough to leave the church,” recalls Wilbur L. Eatinger, the chairman of the building committee. “We worked hard to come up with a design that would please the majority.”

According to the younger Flewelling, many of those who left returned to the church after it was finished.

“They liked it after all,” he said, “and we were pleased that they wrote and told us so.”

Provided Gothic Touches

Flewelling senior had provided as many Gothic touches as he could--the cruciform plan; unfinished, water-stained concrete sections, symbolic references in terrazzo floor and furniture, Scripture carved into the concrete, and windows double glazed so the tinted exterior glass would cast a muted, “weathered” glow over the colored interior glass.

What had elicited doubts was the 270-ton roof, which cantilevers from the supporting, diagonally-placed columns in nine triangular peaks. Below the 40-foot-high windows, the peaks are repeated on the exterior, as they are at the shortest extensions of the cruciform plan.

Flewelling achieved a basket design on the north and south walls of the sanctuary by alternately using conventional and curved blocks.

The three-legged tower (called Trilon by the architect) which substitutes as a steeple soaring 30 feet higher than the already towering church, has a 20-foot, stainless steel crucifix at its pinnacle that some parishioners felt was not grand enough.

Coexistence Stressed

“My husband wanted the lofty, uplifting architectural and spiritual features of the Gothic style to coexist in this church with the contemporary,” says Mrs. Flewelling, widow of the architect.

She feels the cathedral ceiling, as well as the altar, are the sanctuary’s more successful features.

It is the pulpit, however, that makes this church unlike any other. Here, the brutal/delicate juxtaposition of all the church’s architectural elements are melded into one form. Palmer, inspired by Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick,” had instructed Flewelling to “shape it like the prow of a ship, and thrust it out among the people.

“The pulpit, like the prow of the ship, leads the world,” the pastor said. “The pulpit of this church was designed to say to every person who climbs its stairs, ‘come ready to speak for God or come not at all.’ ”