What is the Glass & Garden Community Church?
Most people who drive past 8620 E. McDonald Drive think it is a planetarium or an old bank. It was built in 1966 so people could go to church without getting out of the car.
The Glass and Garden Community Church is a round concrete sanctuary under a 136-foot shallow dome. Architect E. Logan Campbell designed it, structural engineer John K. Parsons worked out the shell, and the congregation dedicated it on May 22, 1966. It was a walk-in, drive-in church. You could take a seat in the sanctuary, which holds more than 1,000 people, or you could park in the east lot, where speakers on posts carried the service the way they carried movie soundtracks at a drive-in theater. The east side of the building is a floor-to-ceiling glass wall that faces the cars. A precast concrete railing runs out through that glass so the pastor could walk outside and preach to the people in the lot.
The City of Scottsdale’s Historic Preservation Office says it is the only drive-in church known in Scottsdale “and possibly in Arizona.” It went on the Scottsdale Historic Register on June 18, 2013. The church that built it was affiliated with the Reformed Church in America. As of this writing (fall 2026) the building is home to Trinity Church.
It is still a working church, so don’t treat it as an attraction. It is also one of the most unusual buildings in the city.
How to see it
Start in the east lot. The parking lot east of the sanctuary was the drive-in, so stand there to read the building the way it was meant to be read. Face west and you’re looking at the glass wall, with the railing running through it at the pastor’s level. The dome sits low over the cylinder, and a lattice metal tower with a cross stands on top. On a weekday the lot is usually close to empty. Stay on the pavement, keep it short and keep the camera off anyone arriving for church business.
Then walk the perimeter from the sidewalk. The city’s report points out details that are easy to miss:
- The precast concrete columns around the drum have green stone mixed into the concrete. They sweep upward in pairs, and each pair makes an upside-down ellipse.
- A band of sculpted, colored concrete trim runs around the top of the wall where it meets the dome.
- The entrance has a projecting half-circle concrete vault with a scalloped edge. Putting a front door on a round building is hard, and Modern Phoenix singles this one out as well done.
- A lava-rock wall runs around the building. The founding pastor wrote that it “shows the strength of God who can melt a mountain if He chooses.”
If you want to see the inside, go to a service. The congregation posts its schedule at thetrinitychurch.com. Inside, the reason to look up is the blue stained-glass skylight at the center of the dome. Modern Phoenix calls the blue “almost-Chartres.” Under it is the single 136-foot span with no columns, which is the whole engineering argument of the building.
Pair it with its neighbor. St. Maria Goretti Catholic Church, a few minutes away at 6261 N. Granite Reef Road, had the same engineer and is the other surviving thin-shell church in Scottsdale. The city’s own “Drive Yourself Mod” tour puts the two churches back to back, and you can see both in twenty minutes. Our midcentury churches note covers the rest of the group, including the ones that were torn down.
A sermon in concrete
The building makes sense once you know where its founding pastor came from. Dr. Floyd W. Goulooze studied at Western Theological Seminary, the Reformed Church in America school in Holland, Michigan. Robert H. Schuller studied there too. In 1955 Schuller started holding services in a drive-in movie theater in Garden Grove, California. The congregation grew, bought ten acres and hired Richard Neutra to design a walk-in, drive-in church with room for 500 cars, finished in 1961. Schuller later built the Crystal Cathedral and became a television preacher. The city’s report cites a Time article from November 3, 1967, “Drive-in Devotion,” which counted more than 70 walk-in, drive-in churches operating in the United States.
According to Modern Phoenix, Goulooze came to Scottsdale from Lakewood, California, in 1963. He bought seven acres of cotton fields on what was then the empty east side of town, betting that Scottsdale would grow toward him. The Glass and Garden church was set up through the RCA’s National Board of Church Extensions. Goulooze’s later booklet about it, which the city quotes by page, is mostly a statement of purpose. The church was “designed with the aim that a Church building should reflect what the Church believes and thus present a sermon thru its architecture.” He chose a circle because it stood for eternity. The building was meant to show creativity “with a purpose” and not copy “building forms of the historical past from civilizations long since dead.” He also explained the drive-in in plain terms: “It is exactly what the name implies, a Church that you attend in your car by simply driving in.” His list of people it served included the invalid and the aged, people who couldn’t handle crowds, people recovering from illness, parents with babies, people who wanted to be alone, and people who “just want to be different.”
The engineering
Campbell’s credits are thin. Modern Phoenix knows of part of the Phoenix Zoo and a 1993 patent for modular housing. The structure, though, has a well-known engineer behind it. John K. Parsons engineered several of the Valley’s adventurous concrete shells: Los Arcos Methodist (1966, demolished 2012), St. Maria Goretti, and the wooden dome of the Skydome at Northern Arizona University. The dome here is a shallow spherical thin shell, 136 feet across and 6 inches thick, reinforced with steel bars on 12-inch centers, and poured in a single day. Thin shells like this were the engineering showpiece of the period. They were cheap in material and needed no interior columns, but they took real skill to design and build. The city’s report traces the idea from Anton Tedesko’s American shells of the 1930s through Félix Candela’s churches in Mexico. It also notes that the method faded after the early 1970s as labor got expensive and engineers who knew how to calculate shells retired.
Modern Phoenix says the building took eighteen months to design and three years to build. It also says the first service was held on Palm Sunday 1966. The city gives the formal dedication as May 22, 1966. Both can be true, but the dedication date is the one on the record. The church added a 6,000-square-foot Family and Youth Center to the north, dedicated October 10, 1972.
What changed, and what nobody has written down
The speaker posts in the east lot came down at some point. The city’s 2013 report says drive-in worshipers could still tune their car radios to hear the service, and Modern Phoenix names AM 800. Modern Phoenix also argues that Goulooze’s bet on location didn’t pay off. Scottsdale grew in every direction except due east, where the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community begins at Pima Road. A 1,400-seat sanctuary is hard to fill.
The Historic Preservation Commission started the designation on December 13, 2012, and the City Council approved it on June 18, 2013 (Ordinance 4090, case 14-ZN-2012). The listing used the then-current name, The Garden Church, and covered about 4.55 acres. The listing was based on design: the city called the building the work of a master, possessing high artistic value and an example of a special type of construction. Today the address is home to Trinity Church. We could not find a public record of when the old congregation left, whether the RCA connection ended, or whether anyone still worships from the parking lot. The answers are probably in the Reformed Church in America Archives in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and in the Scottsdale Room at the Civic Center Library. The Room also holds the Scottsdale Progress on microfilm, and the paper would have covered the 1966 dedication.
Why it matters
Postwar Scottsdale built almost everything around the car: motor hotels, drive-up banks, strip centers and drive-in theaters. This is where that went furthest. A congregation decided worship itself could happen from the front seat and paid an architect and an engineer to build for it. The result is technically ambitious, still in use, and protected. Of the thin-shell churches Scottsdale built in the 1960s, it is one of the two still standing. Look at it from the east lot, where the people in cars were meant to see it.