Sanctuaries Along Streets: Security, Social Intimacy and Identity in the Space of the Storefront Church

Abstract

While storefront churches are pervasive in central city neighborhoods throughout the United States, the spatial disciplines have been slow to incorporate them as a subject of research. The current paper examines the emergence of storefront churches and the ways in which their interior spaces are adapted and experienced by their congregants and clergy. This paper brings to light how disenfranchised groups became associated with the storefront churches and contested a history of marginalization to create unique spaces of religious, social, and cultural importance for themselves. Observations of the arrangement of interior space, the use of everyday objects to shape religious and social gatherings, and in-depth interviews were conducted in seven storefront churches. The study found that clergy and congregants shared a history of migration from the rural South and that the churches generally adhered to southern forms of worship of the sanctified church. Storefront church space was adapted to support aspects of sanctified worship, along with particularistic forms of expressivity of each church's view of the world. The study provides insight into the ways in which storefront churches have emerged as an important space where marginalized groups shape their own designs for modes of worship, communion, and expressivity, disassociated from the dominant society.