Although Björk is reportedly not a big fan of organized religion, she’ll be playing at a church when she next performs in New York.

And she’s not the only one. In the next month, Bloc Party and the Stooges are both playing at the United Palace Theatre on Broadway and 175th Street — a former movie theater that since 1969 has been home to the ministry of Frederick Eikerenkoetter, aka Rev. Ike.

Rev. Ike, for those (like this reporter) too young to remember his ads in the subway (“Don’t wait for pie-in-the-sky, by and by. Get yours now, with ice cream on top!”), belongs to a lineage of African-American evangelists, including Father Divine, Sweet Daddy Grace, and contemporary versions like Creflo Dollar, who have preached a “theology of prosperity.”

Rev. Ike bought the theater in 1969. Formerly called the Loew’s 175th Street, it was built in 1930 as a movie palace. It was designed by a frequent theater architect, Thomas Lamb, who seems to have mingled every vaguely Eastern architectural element he knew of in the eclectic design.

The authors of the architectural history of the city “New York 1930,” Robert A.M. Stern, Gregory Gilmartin, and Thomas Mellins, describe the terra cotta façade as “an indescribable marriage of Classical, Islamic, Mayan, Indian, and Oriental motifs.” But the interior, as restored by Rev. Ike, is even more striking, with its Moorish, Byzantine, and Romanesque influences.

There was a kind of architectural one-upmanship in the construction of movie theaters in New York in this period, Mr. Mellins, who is a curator of special exhibitions at the Museum of the City of New York, said.

“There is by the late ’20s quite a bit of competition for moviegoing audiences,” Mr. Mellins said. “So just as skyscrapers of the period are mining the notion of architecture as advertisement, movie theaters are trying to compete for business by using the architecture, and particularly the interior design, as a kind of drawing card. And one of the masters of this over-thetop interior is Thomas Lamb.”

The Loew’s 175th Street was not the only theater to feature an eclectic, historicist design. Others were done in Italian Baroque, or Spanish, or “Indo-Persian” style. There was a theatricality — a “notion that daily experience can be elevated to a theatrical level” — present in many aspects of culture at the time, Mr. Mellins said, but it was especially strong at the movies.

“There’s this sense that for a modest price, and in a limited period of time, you can be transported to any time in history and any place on the globe,” he said. “With that sense of time and place being so malleable, it makes sense that the setting is equally free in its commodifying of history.”

Like Thomas Lamb, Rev. Ike was a master of theatricality. In the 1970s, his weekly sermons were broadcast on hundreds of television and radio stations. “The best thing you can do for the poor is not be one of them,” he told audiences. He hawked charms that he promised would make the bearers rich, or he sent them by direct mail, instructing the recipient to mail the charm back the next day with a donation. In his 70s now, he only preaches occasionally, but his Web site still sells his wisdom in the form of books, tapes, and videos with titles like “The Master of Money,” “How to ‘Loose’ Your Money,” and “How to Get Out and Stay Out of the Hell of Poverty, Sickness, and Suffering.”

His preaching made at least one person rich: Rev. Ike. In his heyday, he supposedly had a fleet of mink-appointed Rolls-Royces. His wealth has attracted some unwelcome scrutiny: In 1999, the Suffolk County (Mass.) District Attorney’s office launched a fraud investigation into his operations in Boston. In the end, no charges were brought.

In the late 1980s, the church started renting out the 3,353-seat theater for concerts and community events, “to make the theater available to the community and to offset overhead expenses of operating,” the operations manager, Piero Ramos, said. Until the last couple of years, mostly Latin performers played there. But when Mr. Ramos, who studied sound engineering at the State University of New York at Purchase, and had previously worked at the Repertorio Español and City College, arrived, he decided to reach out to bookers of other, non-Hispanic acts.

Does booking rock concerts cause any complications for the church? How would it feel about Madonna doing her crucifixion act? Although “our ministry is primary,” and no performer would be allowed to disrespect the building or the church, “it’s not something where we would just prohibit anyone to come in because you don’t fit our beliefs,” Mr. Ramos said.

As a rock venue, United Palace Theatre is just beginning to catch on. Bloc Party and the Stooges were both booked by the promoter Bowery Presents. Asked why they chose the venue, John Moore of Bowery Presents said, “It’s beautiful, it’s beautiful, it’s beautiful.”

Björk is playing there in May. And in November, as part of its “Berlin in Lights” festival, Carnegie Hall is presenting two performances of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” there with Sir Simon Rattle and the Berliner Philharmoniker performing, and elementary, middle, and high school students dancing. Carnegie Hall’s general manager, Anna Weber, said in an e-mail message that Carnegie Hall chose the theater “because of the building’s fantastic architecture,” and because it wanted the performances in the neighborhood where the participating students live.

Even if you’re not a music fan, there are other reasons to make the trek up to the United Palace Theatre. This Sunday, for instance, Rev. Ike’s wife, Eula Eikerenkoetter (or “the missus,” as Mr. Ramos referred to her) is appearing there. But that’s probably a harder ticket to get than the Stooges.