Up from the Nightclub Floor

On Oklahoma City's northern edge, in 41 acres of what was once part of a golf course, workmen are busy this week installing an organ in the Church of Tomorrow. That is what Pastor Bill Alexander calls it. Some Oklahomans refer to it as Space Headquarters, and that is all right with Pastor Bill. For his First Christian Church is all but out of this world.

Like a monstrous egg half-buried in the ground, pierced by a twisted steel tower, the church itself arcs 110 ft. above a circular sanctuary in which 2,200 people, transported there by escalator, will sit on body-pampering theater seats around a pulpit that rises or lowers at the push of a button.

A Jewel Box Like a Pimple. The preacher who will press the button happily takes time out to escort visitors around his still-unfinished "Landmark for Christ''--into the cylindrical, louvered educational building with its 50 schoolrooms (each with its own washroom), its movie and sound equipment, its $50,000 kitchen ("The women had their way here"), its 500-capacity dining room looking out over the parking lots (675 cars when completed) and outdoor theater (where Miss Oklahoma was picked last month). Pastor Alexander proudly shows off the deeply carpeted little theater-in-the-round, now used by dramatic and ballet groups. "This is our jewel box." he explains. "But from the outside it just looks like a pimple." The concrete, 150 ft. bell tower near by will house an electronic carillon system "to match any in the world." And day and night its top will flare with a big natural-gas torch that Pastor Alexander calls "The Flame of Religious Freedom." Still in the planning stage: a youth center with swimming pool, gymnasium, tennis courts and dance floor. Some of Bill's parishioners wonder how they ever got along with their old church.

"All you need to do now." said Evangelist Billy Graham to Bill Alexander recently, "is to sink an oil well so you won't have to take up a collection." Said Alexander: "That would be the worst thing that could happen to us. People need to give."

The Same Kind of Guy. The Rev. William Hamilton Alexander seems to know what his people need. In fact, he knows his people so well that in the 14 years he has been pastor of Oklahoma City's First Christian Church, he has managed such pastoral unconventionalities as Sunday evening dances in the church recreational hall, an address to the state legislature urging repeal of liquor prohibition, a race for the U.S. Senate (against "Mike" Monroney), and a quiet domestic interchange (a campaign aide married the former Mrs. Alexander, and Pastor Bill married the ex-wife of the aide, after making the announcement of his second marriage from the pulpit).

"If I hadn't been in a church like the Disciples of Christ, in which each congregation is autonomous. I wouldn't have lasted a year." he admits.

William Hamilton Alexander is 41 and powerfully built (6 ft. 3 1/2 in., 230 Ibs.), a preacher's son from Shelbyville. Mo., who dropped out of the University of Missouri after a year to be a nightclub master of ceremonies in St. Louis. But at 20 he changed his mind, took over a dilapidated little church in Stroud. Okla., and made up his college work at the same time, graduating cum laude from the University of Tulsa in 1939. After two years of graduate work at the University of Chicago and a year as pastor in Los Angeles, he was ready to move in on oil-rich Oklahoma City.

The "personal touch'' of a master of ceremonies has shaped Bill Alexander's whole ministry. "When Jesus walked the earth, people didn't line up in long rows to hear him." he said last week. "They gathered around him. So in our church we are bringing the congregation around the preacher . . . There shouldn't be any chasm between a preacher and the people. I'm no special holy person. I'm the same kind of guy as you are. The only difference is that I've taken as my profession the promotion of Christianity."

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