Spring 2024 · Vol. 53 No. 1 · pp. 5–10
The Place of Worship in the Christian University or, the Christian University as a Place of Worship
What is the place of worship in a university? For mainstream culture in Canada, the answer is that it has little place, and certainly little formal place. In my own experience of the large public university—the University of Alberta—the place of worship in the university was largely fugitive. There was no place for worship, except in small student groups who would book a classroom at lunch, say, to meet and sing and pray. I had a strange sense of dislocation on those occasions when we’d be praying in the same room in which I also had a class: the activities of worship and the activities of academics felt not only different but in some way mutually exclusive.
The chapel is a place that bears witness to an entirely different order of things.
I start here because, while it may seem a given that there is a place for worship in a Christian university, we need to acknowledge just how deeply strange a combination this seems to the university world in general. p. 6
In my undergrad experience of Christian groups on campus, these groups varied in character. There were the zealous Christians who, by their own account, were using the situation of the university to evangelize, to reach people for Jesus. This could go two ways. Some were popular and impressive people with a plan and a high level of certainty about methods and goals. In my first year of university I had more contact with these folks. Later, I found myself more in the company of misfits, people who were equally devoted to the Lord, but who lacked social capital and a master plan for growing the kingdom. While I found it disconcerting to be part of this group (I reassured myself that I was a misfit by choice), I found myself much more at home with the misfits than with the high-achieving types. If there is something inherently foolish about the Gospel, then why hide it?
But what both achievers and misfits tended toward was an either-or way of seeing university and Gospel. I genuinely loved university and I genuinely loved Jesus, and I could express both in the same room, but not at the same time, with the same people. Or, to put it in a more nuanced way, there was a profound division between the act of study, of academic work on the one side, and the act of worship on the other. And if you were going to cross that line, you needed to be careful about it, particularly if you were going to make any testimony of worship-life in the academic setting.
Besides these student meetings, there were two places of worship in my undergrad experience. One was the chapel at the Roman Catholic college on campus. I never did attend a service there, but the chapel was a quiet and beautiful little place of refuge for me, a place set apart for prayer and welcoming to the stranger. And the other place was in the Plains Cree (Nēhiyawēwin) language class I took with Emily Hunter in the late 1980s. Emily would begin each class with prayer in Cree, transforming the classroom space from a secular space to a sacred one. Like most elders I’ve met, Emily was a down-to-earth and kind person who embodied her spiritual practices in an everyday way. Her calm presence carried an authority that—unique in my experience—could gently turn the dominant order on its head. I didn’t even think about it at the time—it was just right.
Another crucial person for me in those years was my pastor Neil McLean, who passed away recently. He was a singular man, the son of a violently abusive father, who was saved from that life by the love of Jesus. Neil was an Alliance Church pastor, but an unusual one. Neil loved the university and passionately loved learning. He introduced me to the theologian Karl Barth, and his office at church was jammed with books, on shelves lining the room, books on seemingly everything. One key idea I got from Neil was that there was not a division between the sacred and the secular—at least not the division broadly assumed by church and p. 7 university. The learning of the university was not rightly kept separate from the sacred space of the church. I not only could but should do both.
Neil’s vision is not satisfied with a neutral, secular account of the university, a university that forms a backdrop, an occasion for evangelism; and for that matter, it’s not satisfied with that account of the world either. And this makes our question bigger, because instead of asking merely if there is a place for worship at the university, we need also to ask, is there a place for theology at the university, a place to take Christian thinking seriously? Not coincidentally, both worship and theology have functionally been banished from the dominant Canadian university scene. Or if not banished then driven to the edges and existing in other guises.
But following Neil’s lead, I followed my heart in my graduate studies, working with literary texts that draw deeply on theological resources. My only regret about that is that I didn’t push things further. I was too afraid of critical theory, too much assuming that the thoughtfulness of the university did not have room for theology. One of the great and sustaining things about CMU for me was that when I came here I found really thoughtful people with whom I could more confidently explore. Harry Huebner was especially important in my early years here as someone who thought theologically and philosophically together.
Harry would say strange things, like theology is a grammar. And it is this idea, this point, that is most key to understanding what worship has to do with university. I chose Psalm 148 to be read in chapel this morning because it is the strangest possible way for us to speak, and by way of us speaking it we enter into the grammar of worship. It includes the following call:
7 Praise the LORD from the earth,
you sea monsters and all deeps,
8 fire and hail, snow and frost,
stormy wind fulfilling his command!9 Mountains and all hills,
fruit trees and all cedars!
10 Wild animals and all cattle,
creeping things and flying birds!
Paradoxically, as we with the psalmist directly address the world around us, a world we commonly take to be inanimate stuff, the psalm both places us in a central position and requires that we give up a position of mastery: we surrender a position of detached knowing about the world and take up our relationship with the world around us, the other creatures.
The worst irony of our current situation is that we reflexively understand worship to be exclusive: that if we worship in any traditional way, we p. 8 will be excluding others. We broadly assume that the secular is universal and peaceful, the religious is sectarian and violent. Under these terms, the only way for us to do the Christian thing of welcoming the neighbor is to not do Christian worship. As if the way to be Christian is to stop being Christian.
Worship can definitely be exclusive. It gets exclusive when it starts to feel like we are worshiping in our house, our chapel. As an Anglican I am chagrined when I visit London’s Westminster Abbey and they shoo out all the tourists at service time. While traveling, I once went there for evening prayer and fought my way through a crowd outside to tell the security guard that I was there for the service. As he let me through, a woman in the crowd cried out to me, “What did you say? What did you say?” (As a good Anglican, I just turned and kept walking.) Hundreds of people outside, fifteen inside.
On the same trip, I visited the Basilica of Sacré Coeur de Montmartre in Paris, this time as a tourist. There was a constant flow of tourists inside the church, a kind of parade around the periphery of the building. And in the center a priest was conducting a mass, with a really good sound system. The tourists were collectively noisy but individually quiet, and there was no barrier between the tourists and those who were gathered in the center for worship. The place was radically open, with the heart of its liturgical action alive and well at its center, not merely coexisting with secular tourism, but reorienting that individualistic secular activity as a collective pilgrimage; not making any demands on the guest other than asking for quiet, but rather being open to the guest’s desire. Something has brought the guest here, and we can either play judge on that desire and declare it venal, superficial, non-spiritual, or we recognize it as the same desire we share, as flawed and mixed as that is.
We need to ask for ourselves in this story what Sacré Coeur is willing to compromise and not willing to compromise, and what Westminster Abbey is not willing to compromise and is willing to compromise. I won’t walk through all that, but I will say that the Sacré Coeur situation can only possibly happen because of an overflowing apprehension of worship as an event, at the heart of which is the presence of God. The rabble at the edge belongs and can only belong because God loves that rabble, and the priest at the visible center is also there as a guest in the house of God.
The two services were equally traditional, equally liturgical. One was shaped by a liberal Protestantism that has largely accepted secular reasoning, and the other by a Catholicism that seems utterly foolish in the eyes of the world. But I describe the two not to make particular judgments of their leadership, or to offer them as models of how to do things and how p. 9 not to do things, but rather as emblems that might inform and configure our thinking about the CMU chapel program.
I’ve experienced more welcoming and less welcoming worship services, and the difference has little to do with how welcoming the people are trying to be. What seems to matter most is whether there is a groundedness in their tradition, and most crucially, a living sense that their worship plays host to God. A vivid sense of the latter and a basic confidence in the former reorients us to the gawker, the curious, the wounded, the sin-sick soul.
The Sacré Coeur pattern gets us thinking about boundaries and center. It is not an unbounded space, but a space with open entry, and the openness of the entry is proportional to the groundedness of the center.
King’s College chapel in Halifax has one of the best chapel programs in the country. Highly traditional in form, especially with its attention to church festivals, and highly sympathetic and responsive in attitude, not merely open to the newcomer, but entirely oriented toward the newcomer. No outsiders, but rather a bunch of students doing something together.
In this way, the university chapel is rightly evangelical, inviting students into a tradition without primary concern for what exactly they believe. In this way the university chapel may be very different from some of our students’ churches and communities, some of which have hard boundaries, which Anabaptist communities tend to have. My point is not at all that those hard boundaries are wrong—without such boundaries, for instance, the Hutterites wouldn’t exist, and we’d all be the worse for it. Rather, my point is that the CMU chapel as a university chapel should work more like Sacré Coeur or King’s College: at its heart it is Mennonite Christian worship, to which all are invited.
As the student body includes more people who are less churched, this educational and participatory sensibility becomes all the more important. Chapel has always been a place where students could practice worship, but it needs to be a place aimed at inviting students to try out worship.
To this end, it strikes a balance between groundedness and experimentation, something we presently accommodate in our Tuesday/Friday structure, with Tuesdays being a quiet, meditative chapel that is highly predictable and thus reliable—a spiritual refuge—and Fridays being open to the unpredictable—the new.
Worship is strange and we are both attracted to it and afraid of it. It’s embarrassing to be caught talking to God, especially at a university. But this is an even bigger problem at our big public universities, for these institutions gather people while denying the personal and collective spiritual life of those people. 2 A phobia of religion pervades the universities, even as the universities are hollowed out and remade as skills training p. 10 instruments, reduced to capitalist production lines. We today have no patience for the university as a place of wisdom, where young people can grow roots in the traditions passed down through generations. We instead idealize rootlessness in the form of transferable skills, in a world where everything is interchangeable. The universities as currently desired carry on as if religion is the problem and thus cannot see that their solutions to problems such as climate change and economic crisis are and can only be further manifestations of those problems, fighting fire with fire.
The university chapel exists to be an alternative space for an alternative fire. The chapel is a place that bears witness to an entirely different order of things than that which we think we see around us, an order in which it makes sense for us to speak to the fire and hail, the snow and frost, the stormy wind, calling out to them to praise the Lord, even as they fulfill the Lord’s commands. It is a place that takes in all that we do here, the whole of the curriculum and all our tasks, and reorients them and transforms them into worship. We meet here as pilgrims on a journey, sparked by longing.
NOTES
- This talk was given in CMU Chapel as part of CMU’s “A Time of Reckoning: Telling the CMU Story” symposium, October 27–28, 2023.
- I think here particularly of Willie James Jennings’s comments on convening power in After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2020), chap. 4. The power to convene is both profound and largely unrecognized. Alternate convenings, such as university chapels or the prayer meetings I mention at the beginning of this paper, by their very awkwardness call attention to the existence of the leviathan that is the order they interrupt.
