Religion: Methodist Mosaics

The most beautiful Byzantine apse in the U. S. was dedicated last Sunday not in a Greek Orthodox church but in Manhattan’s Christ Church, Methodist. With its glowing gold, blue, red & black mosaics, its multi-colored marble panels and the ancient ikons on the reredos above its elaborate stone altar, it was a far cry from Manhattan’s John Street Church. That church was the home of the first Methodist Society in the U. S., which split wide open in 1820 and lost many a member because the trustees put a carpet on the pulpit platform.

The pikestaff-plain chapels which Methodism’s Founder John Wesley built had no organ, no steeple, no bell. Most Methodist churches are still on the bare side. But Christ Church’s pastor, Dr. Ralph Washington Sockman, preacher on NBC’s National Radio Pulpit, is all for decoration. Says he: “In the past two decades Protestant churches have made a marked advance in the quality of their church architecture . . . with emphasis on the altar rather than on the pulpit. The theatre type of auditorium is giving way to the stately nave.”

To get their stately nave & apse, Dr. Sockman’s Methodist congregation called on a famed Anglo-Catholic, Medievalist Ralph Adams Cram. Architect Cram is best known for his soaring Gothic fanes—Manhattan’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the chapels at Princeton and West Point, etc.—but decided that Byzantine would look better on Park Avenue. On a Mediterranean cruise he eyed churches in Greece, Italy and Turkey as models, visited quarries and factories to get the marbles and materials he wanted. At last week’s dedication he heaved a sigh of relief because everything had arrived safely. Narrowest squeak: the tesserae (small pieces of marble, glass, gold leaf and enamel) which make up the apse’s mosaics. Shipped from Venice, they got out just before World War II put a stop to imports from Italy.