NOMADIC SACREDNESS
The transcendence of God is absolute and does not change. However, the representation of transcendence is something that cannot be rigidly defined. And because of this unrepresentable nature, attempts to represent it often ends up being false or incorrect. Human representations like language, arts, or concepts are represented within the boundary of human understanding. Therefore, sacred architecture is representing unrepresentable. Also, the churches, which seemed to be one of the most rigid and unchanging institutions, has been changing according to evolving sacred representation. Shadow of the spirit, negative theology, postmodern theology is their attempts to capture this change in sacred representation. Mega-churches in America are one of the changes. Mega-churches are different in many aspects from the traditional churches. It boomed amid the market economy; they adopt business strategies for growth and its places are becoming to resemble market places more and more. Creating a place where more than two thousand people gather, they seek an architecture that is customer-friendly and attractive. However, its mega-size facility brings many problems to maintain its efficiency. To solve this dilemma, many mega-churches adopt multi-site typology, distributing and reaching out to the community by meeting in many different locations using IT technology. The Saddleback Church in Lakewood, California is one of them. It is the second-largest congregation in America and changed with the multi-site church paradigm after reaching the maximum capacity in its main campus. The goal is to plant 10 new Saddleback Regional Campuses by 2010 and its first satellite campus was launched last year in San Clement high school. The multi-site church is a nomadic/ temporal church. In America, about 15% of the churches are nomadic, meeting in school, shopping areas, theaters, community centers…etc.. unlike the permanent building, which can be costly and rigidly limited in size, the nomadic church is more creative and flexible while minimizing the less threatening and more familiar environment for non-believers. Sacradizing profane architecture is a very interesting topic. In temporal use of sacred, the problem of representation merges into a more complex dimension, but also creating new possibilities.