Church looks to future as it celebrates 40 years

Carol Sowers
The Arizona Republic
Nov. 4, 2005 12:00 AM

SCOTTSDALE - Forty years ago, it was a novel idea - a drive-in church where people who didn't feel like putting on their Sunday best could pull up and listen to services from a speaker.

While drive-in movies and churches have faded, Glass and Garden Church is still very much part of the community despite its shrinking congregation and unwelcome publicity over a fired pastor accused of theft.

Sunday the church will celebrate its milestone in a way that harkens back to its opening: an old-fashioned pot luck.

ally Tournay is baking four dozen chocolate-chip peanut butter cookies and Mary Walsemann is tossing "a great big salad."

The Praise Band will play and the congregation will sing the 93-year-old hymn In the Garden.

In honor of the anniversary, church founder Floyd Goulooze, 76, is returning to the Glass and Garden pulpit for the first time since he retired in 1997.

Remembering the past

Goulooze's anniversary message will be "first a look at the past and present, then focus on the future."

The retired pastor has always reveled in the possibilities of the future.

Before coming to Scottsdale, he was preaching at a fast-growing church in Lakewood, Calif., in the early 1960s.

In what he calls "the whole new spirit of energy in the '60s," Goulooze was also on a committee looking for new church sites in California and Arizona. Goulooze came to Scottsdale in 1963 and bought 7 1/2 acres of cotton fields at 86th Street and McDonald Drive, just west of the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community.

"There were two farmhouses on either side of McDonald Drive," he said. "And if you looked north, you could see nothing."

Still, Goulooze thought it was a perfect location for a new crop of parishioners. He had seen plans for a Pima freeway, and there was talk - later abandoned - that non-Indians could lease tribal land and build homes.

It would be awhile before he knew "those things would not materialize," so Goulooze stuck to his plans for a 1,400-seat church, including a drive-in with speakers.

"I had talked to so many people who said they would like to go to church but were worried that they would be called upon to speak," he said. "For some people, the front door of a church is a barrier."

The church was designed by the late E. Logan Campbell, an architect who also worked on what would become the Phoenix Zoo. It took him 18 months to draw plans for the circular church with its impressive domed roof and indoor garden.

Campbell decided on a circular church because it "gave a better feeling of community," Goulooze said.

"I had talked to so many people who said they would rather be out in nature than in a church," Goulooze said. "So we brought the garden indoors."

Construction of the $350,000 church took three years.

Tournay, now a grandmother, watched the church go up.

She remembers being a wiry 10-year-old gymnast, the only kid in the neighborhood who could climb up on the church roof "just to look around."

More than 700 people streamed into the church when it opened on an April Palm Sunday in 1966.

A week later, nearly 4,000 people attended three Easter Sunday services and the drive-in was full.

Focusing on the future

Don Walsemann, a church official, said he realizes Glass and Garden won't turn 40 till next year.

"We're taking a little poetic license," he said.

The Rev. Patrick Shetler planned the anniversary celebration long before he came under investigation earlier this year. He is accused of stealing an estimated $100,000 from the church. Parishioners are awaiting word from the Maricopa County Attorney's Office on whether Shetler will be charged.

Despite the cloud over the church and a congregation that has dwindled to fewer than 200 people, Glass and Garden is not stuck in neutral.

Although it could take months, officials are searching for a new pastor, tightening control of their money to protect it from theft, and are optimistic that the congregation will grow.

The drive-in-speakers are long gone, but parishioners who dread dressing up for services can tune their car radios to 800 AM and still listen to the service.

The houses and freeway that Goulooze counted on pushed out the cotton fields years ago, but the other-worldly-looking Glass and Garden Church is still a landmark for the old neighborhood.

"It's good," Walsemann said. "That we can come together on the occasion of our 40th anniversary and prove our relationship to the community."

Posted by Wintermute at November 5, 2005 11:46 AM