Worship: Where Life Is

The Northshore Shopping Center in suburban Boston has the usual assortment of small shops and department stores, the pedestrians’ mall and the canned music. Down a row of stores, customers can find Coleman’s Fashion Shop and Khouri’s rug store. And be tween the two is a “shop” that is becoming part of a new shopping-center trend. At Northshore, it is called St. Therese’s Carmelite Chapel. It is closed on Sundays, but four Masses daily are conducted there on the other six days of the week, and Father Joel Schevers and his assistants are there to hear confession.

Since shopping centers are becoming more plentiful, and people spend a lot of time there, clergymen are beginning to ask: Why shouldn’t the church follow them there?

Father Schevers’ chapel proves that the idea works. Some shoppers, he says, may come in to St. Therese’s merely to rest their feet. But his 8:30 a.m. Mass gets a lot of employees from the stores near by. Noontime brings in a cross-section of shoppers. For the 4:30 Mass, he gets workers from the electronics factories in the vicinity, and at 5:45, says Schevers, “we get commuters who make this instead of a cocktail stop.”

“That’s Nice.” The Episcopal Church Center at the Cum-Park Plaza Shopping Center in Burlington, N.C., occupies what once was a shoe store, and, says the Rev. John Stone, draws a lot of unaffiliated people to whom “big Gothic buildings may be a bit frightening and strange.” The Episcopal center has a chapel, a sitting area with TV, a counseling room, storeroom and a bathroom. “They can come in and sit down or they can lie down if they want to,” says Stone. “Believe me, the bathroom is not the least used of our facilities either. Did you ever try to find a bathroom in a shopping center?”

Stone and other clergymen in shopping centers find that the biggest attraction is simply in the church’s presence as a spiritual help. “Some people wander in because they’ve heard of the center,” Stone says. “They may look around, say That’s nice,’ and leave, or they may discover there’s a little more to it and sit down and start talking. Some of them are a little nervous. They think if they come in, someone will put an arm around them and ask if they’re saved. They soon get over that. Here’s a place where they can fulfill some need, talk to a sympathetic person. What we try to say to them is that ‘God cares for you, not just your pocketbook, not just your pew space.’ ‘

Ceramics & Sherbet. There are similar shopping-center sanctuaries in and around Baltimore, Topeka and Phoenix, and more still are in the planning stages. The Episcopal Church of St. Ignatius will be the first tenant of Pacheco Plaza shopping center in Marin County, north of San Francisco. St. Ignatius will cost $125,000, offer a nursery school, theater workshop, ceramics classes, and a teenagers’ Friday night discotheque, in addition to religious services.

Clergymen view this trend as a modern approach to an ancient function of the church. For centuries, the church was the focal point of the village marketplace; it was the place where people met as well as worshiped, and it was outside its doors that farmers and craftsmen gathered to sell and trade their goods. Says the Rev. Charles Gompertz, who is in charge of St. Ignatius: “At Pacheco Plaza, we will have a Safeway Store and Herbert’s Sherbet Shop−not quite as colorful as the village marketplace, but nonetheless our American version of the same thing. This is where the church belongs, in the center of things, not stuck off on a quiet residential street. After all, you spend most of your lives in and around the marketplace. This is where life is. There is where Jesus and St. Paul and St. Ignatius did their preaching.”