Guided by congregational memory and a call to welcome more worshipers, St. David of Wales brought a new sacred space to life without leaving its past behind.
By RaeAnn Slaybaugh
As you step onto the campus of St. David of Wales Episcopal Church in Denton, Texas, you’ll find two similar buildings: an elegant, traditional-looking church and an equally sophisticated chapel. Though connected by a sidewalk, they’re not the same: one is 70 years newer than the other.
If you can’t tell the difference, that’s by design.
Aesthetic cohesiveness was a guiding principle for the building team at St. David of Wales. Specifically, leaders aimed to ensure visual connectivity between the original sanctuary and the new one.
For an architect, it’s no small feat to effectively incorporate the appeal and design elements of a historic building with an adjacent new-build. As St. David’s demonstrates, it takes several key elements: a churchwide shared vision for the ministries-to-be, a high level of congregational buy-in and involvement, and just the right architect to bring it all together.
Called home to lead
Building Committee Chair Jesse Davis had a front-row seat for the entire journey.
His connection to St. David’s began in the 1990s, when his mother worked as the church secreta ry for more than a decade. Although Davis himself attended a different church the time, he was confirmed as an Episcopalian in college and started attending St. David’s.
In 2011, he and his wife moved back to Denton from Washington, DC, where he attended law school. Along with his own family this time, Davis also came home to St. David’s.
Within a few years, he was asked to serve on the vestry team, or church board. By 2016, Davis was a senior warden.
Around this time, Davis and his fellow vestry members were heeding the need for expanded worship space. The “80-percent rule” was evident — that is, the parking lot and sanctuary looked so full most Sundays that newcomers went away, thinking there was no room for them.
“Three or four times, we went through cycles of growth that caused us to bump up against our capacity,” Davis explains. “Maybe it was population growth in our city, or a bunch of babies were born, bringing an influx of young families. Maybe a new crop of professors moved into the neighborhood.”
All this, coupled with too many Christmas and Easter services adding folding chairs in the foyer and parish hall, were clear indicators it was time to expand.
“I distinctly remember a number of high holy days where people watched church on a TV in the parish hall,” Davis recalls. “They deserved a spot in the nave of the church, in the main worship space.”
Indeed, the original 149-person-capacity church — built in 1955 — just wasn’t cutting it anymore.
“At least that’s the number we gave brides and wedding planners,” Davis laughs. “But it included almost everybody in the altar party. We were probably even counting the chair the priest sits in, plus every seat in the choir pews.”
From questions to clarity
In 2016 — the same year he became a senior warden at St. David’s — Davis was appointed chair of the building committee. The group had a lot of initial questions: Can we expand on our current parcel of land? Should we be thinking about building somewhere else? Given the size of the church, can we financially support a building project — or should we be looking at vacant (or soon-to-be vacant) church properties?
“We knew we needed to enlist more knowledgeable people than just ourselves,” Davis explains. “And in the church world, as you know, we don’t reinvent the wheel; we call around and ask who’s had a good experience or outcome with whatever situation you’re facing.”
As they did their due diligence, a large, prosperous Episcopal church in nearby Dallas — which had recently finished an extensive building project — recommended HH Architects. “We liked what they’d done with [Church of the] Incarnation,” Davis explains. “And we heard nothing but good things from them about the relationship and the process.”
As a next step, the St. David’s building committee ‘passed the hat’ to fund the hiring of HH Architects for a feasibility study. Based on those findings, the committee decided to build at their current location — but build what?
For one thing, it would need to house about 350 seats — three times as many as the church’s current sanctuary capacity. That kind of building would occupy more than 13,000 square feet, including a 2,700-square-foot nave. Most important, it needed to be designed by someone who really ‘knows’ churches.
“We certainly didn’t have to stick with HH Architects after our feasibility study — but we did,” Davis recalls. “At the time, the firm that built our original church was still in business down the street here in Denton. But we liked what HH had in their portfolio.”
Tradition guides design decisions
Now, St. David’s new church building is part of that impressive portfolio — in large part, no doubt, because the building committee stuck to their vision and hired that church architecture firm they liked so much.
Davis explains: “If I’m the CEO of a bank that needs a new space, I’m thinking about what security looks like and where I’ll put on my bankers. The style will be up to my board of directors and me. I’m probably thinking: It’s a bank — what else is it going to look like but a bank?”
In contrast, he points out, liturgical presence mattered a lot for the design of the new building at St. David’s.
“It’s especially important when the focus of the worship is on the bread and the wine, the body and blood of Christ that are there, really present, in the room with you,” Davis explains. “It’s important that we give everyone the opportunity to take part — especially folks who, if they used a wheelchair, in our old space couldn’t go to the altar rail and receive communion in the same way that able-bodied people could.”
Even so, this original space — now called Christ the King Chapel, or the Historic Chapel — is beloved by many members of the church family. “We heard over and over again: ‘Can’t we just have the same thing but bigger?’” Davis recalls. “After all, that’s where they got married, where their children were baptized. We have a columbarium there; it’s where they still visit their loved ones. We knew the architectural vocabulary of the new church had to come from the old church.”
Although those church members probably didn’t know it then, they were asking for a traditional English church. It meant Gothic pointed arches. Stonework on the exterior. A choir between the chancel and the altar rail with pews that face each other. An altar placed a little further back and elevated just a bit so people in the last pews can see what’s meant to be the liturgical focus. Three steps up to the altar, because St. David’s is, importantly, a Trinitarian church. A lectern and pulpit placed separate and apart, with the lectern featuring a carved wooden eagle.
“Even down to the brick colors, everything is a reflection of congregational memory shaping the architecture,” Davis points out. “Within budget constraints and with modern building methods and safety features — sprinklers, fire exits, that kind of thing — we did our best to create a church that’s a larger reflection of the church we were already worshiping in.”
Here again, Davis praises HH Architects for being able to blend modern construction elements with modern budget considerations and still achieve the desired traditional-looking architecture.
“If money was no object, then we’d build a big, Gothic cathedral, right?” Davis says. “But that’s not the reality. In some places, we needed to use drywall instead of brick and stone. The millwork around the altar is different from what we have in the old church, but it’s stylistically very similar.”
The list goes on, but the theme is the same throughout the project: the new church — successfully — pulls design cues from the English Gothic vocabulary of the old church.
Crucial: congregational involvement in design, funding
Davis and his team went to great lengths to ensure everyone who would ultimately worship in the new space had stylistic input on it.
“Our goal from the beginning was to involve as much of the church as we could in the appropriate aspects of design,” he acknowledges. “The best way to do that was with a series of surveys, focus groups and fireside chats — not a committee of 100 people arguing about paint colors.”
Indeed, the first (and perhaps most crucial) question they asked the church family was: Do you agree that we need a new church building?
It wasn’t a loaded or rhetorical question; the building team made sure of that.
“Yes, we talked with them about the need for additional worship space in order to grow,” Davis points out. “But we also talked about not growing just for growth’s sake.”
The message: growth needed to be driven by mission — not ego.
“We weren’t growing just because we wanted to be a bigger church. We were growing — naturally — because more people were being led to Christ, specifically in the Episcopal tradition, than we could accommodate,” he explains. “So, if we wanted to have the capacity to be the church we felt called to be — with room for seekers, newcomers and new converts — then we had to grow.”
Crucially, of course, this meant securing the funds — as well as the staff and volunteers — to make it happen. And those are three things only the church family can provide.
And so they did.
Including land donations (of a few neighboring properties that parishioners owned) and hard costs and soft costs, the project budget came in at $7 million. Additionally, the church family gave donations for liturgical furnishings such as candlesticks, wall hangings, millwork, pews, and even a digital organ.
Every step of the way, Davis notes, the HH Architects team walked with the church.
“Obviously, they’re architects and we paid them well for their services — but they really became mission partners in a way,” Davis says. “They understood why we needed to grow and what we were being called to do with the new building. That really made all the difference.”
Ministry, multiplied
With the completion of the new building, St. David’s began almost immediately to reap benefits — specifically, in the form of enhanced, expanded ministry capabilities. One of the first gatherings in the new church was the funeral of a much-loved church member and community figure.
“When someone like him passes away, people like to pay their respects. They want to come and comfort the family. It’s an important part of what we, as a church, do as a part of a wider community,” Davis says. “Having the larger space available to accommodate that gathering made a difference in how we could minister to a grieving widow, her family, and a grieving community. It was a very, very full church that day and a very meaningful celebration of life.”
Additionally, moving Sunday services to the new church opens up the original church-turned-chapel space for other gatherings. For example, St. David’s now conducts a well-attended daily mass.
Beyond this, church meetings, Bible studies, midweek services and special sermons are all happening regularly in the chapel.
“When we have guest preachers on Sundays, they usually do a little talk in there between services,” Davis says. “I don’t think we fully appreciated how useful that space would be.”
Connected by what matters
Although the two churches at St. David’s are their own individual structures, the sidewalk between them is where the separation ends. They’re connected in more important ways: visually, of course — with cohesive design — but above all, with a shared vision for the church St. David’s is today and will be tomorrow.
