The following is a reprint from the Morning Call, September 6, 1996
Windows tell stories at Springtown Church
When the opportunity arose last summer for Thomas J. Morton of Kintnersville to give a lay sermon at his church, he decided to research the building's stained glass windows. Morton, is a graduate student of architectural history. There are eight stained glass windows in the sanctuary of Salem United Methodist church, where Morton and his family have been members since 1985. The church is in the Springtown section of Springfield Township. Each window is rectangular and has a cross its entire length. At the center of the cross is an oval shape, and within the oval is a scene- a different one for each window.
"A viewer should understand the stained glass," Morton said, "and I concluded that the theme of each one is really very easy to understand although, I explained, it's possible that these windows have multiple meanings."
After Morton's sermon last summer, several members of the congregation asked whether they could get copies of it. Then it was suggested that he do a series of articles on the windows for the church newsletter.
"I put the finishing touches on, pulled specific Bible verses and made it much more complete," he said. One year later, on Aug. 18th, the church's pastor, Rev. Sungnam Choi, presented Morton with a 34 page booklet, "The Window Stories."
The booklet is a compilation of the monthly articles that Morton wrote between September 1995 and July 1996. Morton was asked to deliver the Aug. 18th sermon and copies of the booklet were distributed to the congregation.
Choi has been serving the Salem church as well as the St. Paul United Methodist Church in Hellertown since July 1995. "My primary purpose for putting together the booklet," he said, "was that Tom's articles were too good to be forgotten. If someone did not compile the articles, they might be forgotten." Morton called his Aug. 18th sermon "Toward Understanding the Spiritual through the Physical."
"The windows are physical, and through our faith, they take on a spiritual meaning," he said. The window most easily seen from the pew where Morton's family sits depicts a standing bundle of wheat in the foreground, against a background of a field of uncut wheat, mountains and blue sky. "The separation of the bundle of wheat from the remainder of the field reminded me of the division between Christians and non-Christians," Morton wrote in one of his articles.
"We, as Christians, are gathered together and united by our faith, just as the bundle of wheat is gathered together by the Lord. We can simply live our lives together in our Christian communities, united by our belief in the Savior, or we could take our commitment to mission seriously..."
He concluded that the scene was related to Matthew, Chapter 13, verses 37-40, which states in part, "He who sows the good seed is the Son of Man. The field is the world, and the good seed means the Sons of the Kingdom..."
Another window depicts a chalice, and Morton explored the concept of the communion in his faith. "Although there are several passages in the Bible where the terms chalice/cup are mentioned," he wrote in the third article of the series, "I believe the most important ones are those which are concerned with the Last Supper...In summary, we can take the chalice, seen in the window by the piano, to represent the cup of Christ, and His blood which was poured out for the remission of our sins."
"What is unique to our church is that there are no people in the windows," Morton said. "To me, I though it was wonderful. That way, the viewer is the person in the scene." Morton is in his second year of graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. He spen two summers in Rome, in a study-abroad program in 1993 and as a research assistant in 1994, and while there he visited many of the city's churches and museums. "Each time I came back, I looked at our windows and I said, "Oh, that's what it means," he said.
In the first of his articles for the newsletter, Morton detailed the history of stained glass windows, beginning with four early examples of Christian churches in Rome which, he said, set a precedent for all other churches for the next 800 years.
The interior walls of the early churches were decorated, not stained, with paintings representing scenes from the Bible and, in one of the churches, he said, "the windows consisted of mica panes surrounded by stucco gratings." "It is with these gratings that patterns were created in the windows of early Christian churches," he wrote.
Morton's mother, Anita, is the membership secretary of their church. His father, Charles, is its lay leader.
Although the history of the congregation of the Salem church can be traced to 1837, the existing church building was built in 1868. The windows were made in the 1940's.
The church is in the Georgia Harkness district, one of seven districts of the Eastern Pennsylvania conference of the United Methodist Church. District Superintendent Rev. Ted McCabe was at the Aug. 18th service to dedicate a new roadside sign for the church, designated as a memorial sign by two families of the congregation.
Morton described the architectural structure of the building as "just a very traditional, small-town Protestant church; simple, one room, rectangular. The fact that there are these scenes (in the windows) help us in our spiritual understanding," he said.
"Also, there is no place you can stand in the church and see all the scenes at one time," he said, "but wherever you sit, you can see at least one and it becomes your personal window and you can focus on it."
