Stronger than steel

Have you noticed the beams? The ones that make a church worship space look like an upside-down ark? Maybe you enjoyed counting them as a kid during a long sermon (once you were done tallying the organ pipes or tracking the sun’s progress across the hymnal board).

Those familiar wooden ribs are a bit of a time stamp. Of the 158 Christian Reformed Church (CRC) buildings built from 1948-1980, 75 have massive laminated wood beams supporting the roof. The other 83 were built with no ribs exposed, or with lower ceilings. In the 40 years after that (1980-2020), only eight of the 94 new church buildings had their interior ribs showing; the other 86 were built with lower roofs or an industrial look.

Churches today

Glen Reinders of Reinders and Associates, an architectural firm in Milton, Ontario, has been designing churches for more than 30 years. These days, he says church building teams are seldom interested in symbolism. They care more about: “What’s going to bring people into and keep them in the seats, for a conversion experience to connect them with Jesus.” Lately, he’s been designing mostly Salvation Army and Pentecostal buildings.

“Efficient, effective, flexible, few(er) symbols, more gyms, places for kids’ programs,” says Reinders describing the most popular designs. In fact, he says, for every 3.5 auditorium seats, there should be space for one child in the nursery. Members want relationships; the lobby needs to be 20 percent larger than the auditorium.

The CRC’s church buildings often don’t look like that. Thirty-two percent still have worship spaces with exposed ribs. Many have medium-sized lobbies, nurseries that are being renovated and not necessarily a gym. But the builders of these churches had good, theologically sound and practical reasons for their architectural choices.

Why the exposed ribs?

Let’s dig in a little. The technical name for these iconic wooden arches is glulam (glued-laminated) and the story of glulam starts before World War II in Germany, takes off in Great Britain and is redeemed in Canada.

A German inventor, Otto Hetzer, conceived and patented glulam in the early 1900s. It entailed gluing (wide and thin) strips of wood, end to end and atop each other. The invention of increasingly strong adhesives combined with this layering technique allowed for the development of massive, curved beams that could compete with steel and concrete. Glulam arrived in North America by 1934, though it was not generally adopted by architects here for another 15 years.

Meanwhile, in the U.K., Geoffrey De Havilland, a pilot and aviation pioneer, correctly assumed that aluminum would be in very high demand if war broke out. He and his team began developing a wooden bomber in early 1938 called The Mosquito. It had a laminated one-piece front and rear wings and a monocoque body (meaning the frame and outer skin were essentially one and the same). It was powered by two Rolls-Royce Merlin engines. The prototype had a maximum speed of 400 mph and a flight ceiling of approximately 33,000 feet, evidence of the laminated wood’s amazing strength. A particular advantage of glulam was that it was, perhaps counter-intuitively, fire-resistant since fire would char the exterior, then protect the interior and would neither warp nor buckle at high temperatures. Of the 7,778 Mosquito bombers built, 1,134 were made in Canada at the Canadian De Havilland plant in Downsview, Toronto.

The Mosquito used balsam and birch laminates, as well as Sitka spruce, ash, walnut and Douglas fir laminates. Its key ingredient, however, was the glue. Originally milk-based glue was used, but it degraded in humid climates. To counter this, synthetic urea-formaldehyde glues were developed, producing a bond stronger than the wood itself. These were high-performance, water-resistant adhesives essential for the fighter-bomber, and equally essential for the post-war building boom.

The strength, safety, economy and durability of glulam were not lost on architects after the war.

With high-grade steel still being both expensive and scarce, glulam architectural applications and refinements were seen as ideal for extended spans and/or high ceilings post-World War II. Canada’s lumber industry pivoted to meet the demand and our vast forests provided more than enough material. Glulam beam manufacturing began to spring up around Canada for churches, arenas, warehouses and more.

Cheap and effective

It was at this time in architectural history that the Dutch immigrants began arriving in Canada. Around 137,000 of them in total; perhaps 40-50,000 Calvinists. Most of those Calvinists prioritized building a place of worship within two to three years after they were established, often before the members’ own homes were completed.

A major architect/builder in southern Ontario, Dick Veenendaal, built a dozen CRC churches in the region, using one-piece wooden beams in the walls (no steel). The draftsman who designed his roofs had also designed railroad bridge trestles across Canada, so he was very familiar with designing load-bearing structures from beams. The trusses he built for church roofs were engineered similarly to the railroad bridges. They were then hidden above the ceiling behind plywood.

However, shortly after these churches were being designed and built, various other architects and designers of Canadian CRCs discovered and began using glulam beams to provide everything the immigrants were looking for at a substantially reduced price. Henk Mastenbroek designed around 16 church buildings in south-central Ontario, all using exposed glulam beams and similar plans.

The strength of glulam beams allowed for steep, high arches and peaks, fitting the reformed sense of God’s majesty and sovereignty. These early immigrants wanted the sacraments and the word to be on a platform in the front, with the pulpit (not a lectern) at the centre. The worship space was supposed to have completely unobstructed views of the preacher, with benches in rows facing the front. A worship space built to God, for his people.

Telling a story

Whether you worship under glulam arches or not, whether your church building is older or newer, renovated recently or a long time ago, it’s telling a story. In the case of most reformed worship spaces, the buildings were made to say: here the word of God is preached and the sacraments are central; the people are organized and facing the front.

If your church is considering a building or renovation project, you’ve probably spent some time thinking about the story you want your space to tell (and how much the supplies will cost!). You’ll need to decide how to balance “this is the house of God” and “this is the house for the people of God” in the design of your building. Because that’ll be the story your building tells.

Today, reformed congregations continue to reach out, plant churches and share God’s good news. Many churches speak of love and openness, and a desire to embrace cultures other than our own – a different conversation than the one Post-World War immigrants were having. As the conversations in our churches shift, it won’t be a surprise if our church buildings begin to speak the same language.