Our Building Story

History of St Stephen UMC’s Church Building

St. Stephen was founded in 1959 during the Civil Rights era. Our founding pastor, William K. McElvaney and his new congregation began challenging the binding and oppressive structures which characterize the status quo at the church’s formation. From this beginning, St. Stephen has challenged contemporary norms in its outward appearance as well as its approach to ministry and community engagement.

The church building was constructed in 1962 with a design by James Pratt, Harold Box, and Philip Henderson that captured the organic nature of the liturgy through its biomorphic forms. The building references Le Corbusier’s Notre Dame du Haut Chapel (1955) at Ronchamp in France. It placed one of the most avant-garde buildings in the country in one of the most unlikely places, a Dallas suburb. The architects employed innovative facade technology by spraying a combination of cement and fiberglass, known as Archilithics, over concrete blocks laid without mortar, further differentiating the church from the surrounding postwar architecture. (See photos of the church’s construction and completion on our Building History page.) The first 12,000 square feet of St. Stephen was part of a visionary master plan that posed new answers to the age-old question: “What should a church look like?” Though only the initial portion of the St. Stephen plan was completed, the architecture has become “a symbol for openness and the willingness to initiate creative solutions to present day challenges.”

From the start, the congregation understood the church’s architecture as a theological expression of shape and form. Thus, the congregation conceived of the building as a physical manifestation of what they thought a church, as the body of Christ, ought to look like. The building remains just such a sacramental expression as the church continues to engage with this question. The congregation has worked to preserve the integrity of the building’s architecture by minimizing alterations to its original plan. The building is currently undergoing repairs with emphasis on maintaining its historical characteristics.