The Quietly Dangerous Suburban Church — How three architects in the 1950s tried to meld religion, modernism and suburbia: The marks of the church are word and sacraments (AC VII); thus, here is a study for the-spiritual-and-the-material, a key Reformation insight about the Gospel. To what extend are other spatial elements important and edifying? The 1950s and ’60s built countless churches as modestly modernist structures, often dismissed as “gas station” or “grocery store” churches and criticized as ugly, derivative, and second-rate. From the beginning, these new churches caused genuine concern.