# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1861_S314
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

314 Regulation for Evangelical Church Building.

The choice of building system for the individual case should, however, follow not so much the personal artistic taste of the builders as the predominant character of the local building manner of the region. Also, any usable remains of older church buildings that exist should be carefully preserved and put to determining use.

Likewise, the individual components of the fabric in its interior arrangement, from the altar and its vessels down to the pews and furnishings, and in particular the organ as well, must correspond to the style of the church.

4. Church building calls for durable material and solid construction without deceptive plastering or paint finish meant to imitate something else. If, for the interior structure, timber construction is chosen — which is especially favorable to acoustics in the roofing — it must not be made to take on the appearance of masonry construction. The chancel is in any case to be vaulted solidly.

5. The main entrance to the church stands most fittingly in the middle of the western end wall, so that the long axis of the church extends from it to the altar.

6. A tower should be lacking nowhere that the means at all suffice, and where one is presently lacking, provision should be made that it be carried out later. It is to be wished that it stand in organic connection with the church, and, as a rule, above the western main entrance to it.

Two towers stand fittingly either at the sides of the choir, or else they flank the west front of the church.

7. The chancel (choir) is to be raised several steps above the floor of the nave. It is large enough if it affords, on every side around the altar, the space required for the liturgical acts.

Other seating, such as for the clergy and the churchwardens, and, where custom brings it with it, the confessional, does not belong there.

Nor may any screens separate the chancel from the nave.

8. The altar may, according to liturgical and acoustic need, stand more toward the front or the rear, between the chancel arch and the rear wall, but may never be placed directly (without a passage behind it) against the rear wall of the choir.

One step higher than the chancel floor, it must have rails, as well as a kneeling arrangement for confirmands, communicants, wedding couples, and so forth.

The altar, as such, is to be marked by a crucifix, so far as no confessional reasons stand against it; and where an architectural superstructure rises above the altar table, any figural work, relief, or painting connected with it is always to represent only one of the chief facts of salvation.

9. The baptismal font may stand in the vestibule of the main portal, within the enclosing walls of the church, or in an adjoining