The North Philly megachurch that replaced the city’s lost cathedral of baseball

It is uncanny how often new buildings subconsciously recall the one they’ve replaced. Philadelphia’s City Hall is a Beaux-Arts extravaganza, done up in white marble, but its central tower echoes the Colonial version on top of Independence Hall, the previous home of city offices. An apartment building that opened last year on Columbus Square is a nearly exact copy of the factory that previously occupied the corner. And in North Philadelphia, a megachurch built on the site of the late, and still lamented, Connie Mack Stadium could easily be mistaken for one of today’s retro ballparks.

Deliverance Evangelistic Church, the 5,000-seat home of an influential Pentecostal denomination, was completed in 1992, the same year that Baltimore’s Camden Yards opened and set off a craze for old-timey ballparks. Although the African American church at 21st and Lehigh doesn’t have Connie Mack’s rich details or the same intense urban presence, the design is fascinating for the way it anticipates one of the defining architectural trends of the late 20th century. Yet it was not created by an architect, but by a contractor who specialized in megachurches: Roe Messner, who played a key role in Jim Bakker’s spectacular fall from televangelical grace, and then married his ex-wife, Tammy Faye Bakker.

That’s a lot to absorb, so let’s catch our breath at Deliverance’s front door on Lehigh Avenue.

Like many shopping malls and schools built during the ‘80s and ‘90s, Deliverance is a vernacular interpretation (some might say, corruption) of the Postmodernist ideas developed by Robert Venturi in his manifesto, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. Postmodernists were big fans of classical details, such as arches and columns. But rather than use those features in traditional ways, they stretched, flattened and exaggerated them into abstract shapes. Deliverance’s entrance is essentially a pancake-flat version of the portal to a Greek temple. Arched windows march along the church’s facades — the left and right field walls, if you will — in a simplified version of Connie Mack’s Renaissance-style arches.

There is little in Deliverance’s history to suggest that baseball figured in its gospel. The church was founded in 1961 by the Rev. Benjamin Salters and his wife, Essie, who were influenced by street evangelism, as well as the growing evangelical movement. Initially, the Salters held services in their home. As their congregation grew, they rented space in a variety of old buildings in North Philadelphia. The church was taken over by the Rev. Benjamin Smith Sr., whose charismatic preaching attracted even more followers.

For many Philadelphians, however, baseball was the more important religion. And Connie Mack was their cathedral.

Connie Mack wasn’t Philadelphia’s first ballpark, but it may be the one that fans remember most fondly. The stadium was commissioned in 1908 by Ben Shibe, a Philadelphia sporting goods manufacturer who had just helped establish the upstart American League with a new team, the Philadelphia Athletics. The Phillies, a National League team, were already playing in North Philadelphia at the Baker Bowl. But many baseball executives had grown dissatisfied with the rowdiness of the National League fans (sound familiar?). Shibe wanted to use the American League to create a more refined experience.

At the time, most ballparks were little more than rickety, wooden grandstands. Shibe asked William Steele & Sons, an up-and-coming engineering firm, to design a modern stadium made from concrete and steel. The firm had just finished one of Philadelphia’s first skyscrapers, the 11-story Witherspoon Building on Walnut Street, and was known for its concrete skills.

Steele & Sons developed a design that was unlike any other ballpark. The entrance of what was originally called Shibe Park (later renamed for legendary Athletics manager Connie Mack), at the corner of 21st Street, was marked by a handsome tower, capped with an elegant cupola. Unlike today’s stadiums, which are islands in a sea of parking, the 23,000-seat stadium was a true urban building, tightly woven into its rowhouse neighborhood.

What distinguished Shibe Park was that it was also “a serious work of architecture,” the critic Paul Goldberger writes in his fascinating history Ballpark: Baseball in the American City. “It was, more than any ballpark before it, a statement about the role of the ballpark as a civic building, as a public gathering place, and a civic institution worthy to take its place beside museums, courthouses, and concert halls.”

The Athletics thrived in Connie Mack, and so did its North Philadelphia neighborhood. On game days, the stout rowhouses on 20th Street were jammed with fans who couldn’t get tickets to the ballpark, and settled for cheaper seats on the roofs of the houses. Shibe continued to add seats to his park and eventually built a “spite wall” to block the view. In 1938, the Phillies moved in and the Eagles joined them in 1940. But baseball was changing. The Athletics abandoned Connie Mack in 1954 for, of all places, Kansas City (and later, Oakland).

In 1970, the Phillies also left North Philadelphia, moving to Veterans Stadium, a multipurpose concrete doughnut set amid a swirl of highways instead of a neighborhood. The old ballpark was used as a junkyard, then demolished in 1976. The block, and the one next to it, sat empty for more than a decade before Deliverance offered to buy it from the city.

By then, Deliverance had more than 10,000 members, Martha Addison, the head of human resources, told me. Before going ahead with construction, she said, church leaders embarked on a tour of other megachurches. It soon became clear that they were all the work of one person, Messner, a contractor and evangelical Christian. Messner is credited with designing 1,784 churches in 48 states. While they vary in appearance, they all share one trait: huge, column-free sanctuaries where the congregation can gather around the pulpit.

It’s not clear whether Messner was inspired by the memory of Connie Mack when he designed Deliverance, or whether he was merely channeling Postmodern tropes. He had made his reputation in 1978 with another neo-traditional project, Heritage USA, a Christian theme park designed for the Bakkers’ PTL Club. For a decade, Jim and Tammy Faye were a televangelical juggernaut, generating $120 million annually in revenue. But the PTL Club (as in, Praise the Lord) fell apart in the late ‘80s when Bakker and Messner were caught up in a seamy sex-and-fraud scandal. Messner later shocked his evangelical friends by leaving his wife and marrying Tammy Faye, a flamboyant figure who had become a tabloid star.

When Deliverance opened in 1992, it was the East Coast’s largest megachurch, Addison said. Along with a massive, light-filled sanctuary, it houses a 1,000-seat theater, gym and Bible institute. Membership is now about 3,500.

Apart from the exterior, there are few references to baseball. According to Addison, Smith asked Messner to locate the pulpit on the spot where home plate used to be, “so he could hit a home run every time he preached.” But it ended up in the center of the block, rather than the historic spot at 21st and Lehigh. Even if Messner misplaced home plate, Deliverance still stands as an unlikely tribute to the best ballpark Philadelphia ever had.