By RAY WADDLE

During an April vacation visit to the old town Arles, France, I was wandering inside an 800-year-old church, along with other tourists, and we all seemed to know to shut up.

There was no sign telling us to keep quiet. The place itself inspired it – those thick stone walls along shadowy corridors, the high ceilings, pillars, and brilliant stained glass. It was a Romanesque monument of faith, design and survival across the centuries, and it invited awe.

Our silence struck me as a hopeful sign in our age of noise: People are still capable of reverence.

Those medieval ancestors are mysterious and distant now. Yet they created churches that still speak to us, announcing a particular view of God. Every church does that, even now: it reflects an attitude toward the Almighty.

In the case of the churches of medieval Europe, the message was God’s majesty. Plague, invasion and early death defined their experience. It required a different view of God than the kind we usually embrace. In their case, God was greater than their travails, but distant too. People died unpredictably from disease (no microscopes in those days, no antibiotics), and no answers came. God in his silence had to be bigger than pestilence. Jesus as “personal savior” was not an American-style phrase. Jesus was in the bread and wine communion elements. People found truth and reassurance there.

We claim a far more intimate relation with God these days. At least our language claims it, giving God credit for helping us land the job or win the music award. I remember the old bumper sticker, “God is my co-pilot” – a solemn expression of faith, but also a strange statement the more I think about it. It suggests life is a modern contraption, something human-invented and operated at great expensive, from a cockpit. If God is the co-pilot, then that makes me the pilot. I’m in charge. It’s as if God is a mere co-equal, a colleague through the storm, someone to high-five with later. So much for the majesty of the Lord.

Vast stone churches are still built today, but so are megachurch auditoriums and rustic A-frame buildings. Each reflects a different theology of worship, a different image of God. This is one of the great dramas of our time: up for grabs is the idea of the God we worship.

I know of ministers who boast that their church looks like a mall. Their message is God is accessible in an everyday sort of way, so church shouldn’t be intimidating or churchy but should look like an everyday sort of building -- and with a food court. The interior should provide comfortable theater-style seas (not pews) and make it easy for everyone to see the Sunday-morning PowerPoint presentation during sermon time. Minor-chord hymns, which might introduce spiritual dissonance, are stricken from the list.

Tension between modernity, tradition and pluralism make for a wide-open discussion of worship, theology and, not least, church design.

Baird Dixon, a Nashville architect who designs mainline churches, says it’s a fascinating time to do his work. He has seen the spiritual climate change in 25 years. Congregations want their worship space to be more flexible these days, so it can accommodate a diversity of worship experiences. In many places, communion table and baptism font are more central than they used to be, he says. Congregations are more alert to liturgical possibilities than decades ago, and they want more input when it’s time to build a new church.

“The religious landscape is so different now,” he says.

“There’s a sense that the institutional church can’t do what it used to do and still survive.”

Dixon’s firm, Dixon Street Rick, designed the new building for Second Presbyterian Church in Nashville – Dixon’s own church -- after fire destroyed the previous one.

The new one, dedicated last year, contains various historical details – the steeple tower, white brick, wood shutters. But the new design also floods the sanctuary with natural light through the clear windows, emphasizing a connection with the outside world. The high ceiling, 380-seat sanctuary and semi-circular pews remind worshipers that they are a gathered community whose primary focus is the worship of God.

“God is the central reason we’re here,” he says.

Whether it is the South of France, or South Nashville, the unique silence of a special church space has the power to jar a person back to reality. The reality is larger, better, than the avalanche of media images and bad news and incessant daily anxieties of our own making. At such quiet moments, in a church that focuses on divine majesty, time slows down, like an abundant, ever-replenishing river. It generously carries us along, a new entry into the present moment.