{Another day in Lent 2021, and a visit to another sanctuary. This slide took some time to find, but this particular sacred space is special for reasons I share below.}

Wallace Chapel is on the campus of Westminster College, New Wilmington, Pa. It’s the school where I majored in religion, philosophy, and psychology, what was referred to as a “tri-major,” especially designed for pre-ministerial students. I eventually majored in a co-ed named Joan, but that’s a story for another time, maybe not Lent.

This scene was photographed on a Sunday night, College Vespers, and if memory serves, that is the esteemed Pittsburgh Theological Seminary professor Dr. Donald Miller in the pulpit. Above him, the Westminster Concert Choir. (There was a larger 130-voice Vesper Choir that usually sang at these weekly services, but since I was in that choir and since I took this photo, it’s clear “my” choir wasn’t singing that night.)

These vespers services often included well-known preachers, though sometimes the college President Dr. Will Orr or the Chaplain The Rev. Jud McConnell would speak. (About halfway through these services, we’d all hear the clatter of horse hooves on the streets of New Wilmington as our Amish neighbors headed home from their day-long Sunday worship.)  Most memorable to me, though, was the music: pipe organ and voices filled that wing of Old Main with glorious sound that fed my spirit, maybe because I felt a part of it all. Singing bass safely surrounded by another thirty men singing my part, learning solid, ageless sacred repertoire, and actually enjoying the twice weekly hour-long rehearsals– well, that whole experience shaped my life and ministry in profound ways. 

But the focus of this entry is the meaning of the room itself, not just Vespers. The chapel was sacred even when empty. I had grown up in church, and our sanctuary at home was used for corporate worship. Sunday mornings, some Wednesday nights, funerals, weddings. But it never would have occurred to me to just go in one weekday after school and sit in a pew and pray. I don’t recall anyone using the sanctuary for private devotions. But when I got to college, I discovered classmates beginning their mornings in the silence of the chapel, praying. The rest of the day, cutting through the chapel to enter Old Main’s classrooms meant walking quietly and respectfully past pews where one or two people might be meditating. I too adopted that morning routine, not every morning, but often enough that I remember it now. So, there was that: personal prayer in the quiet of a place set apart.

One November afternoon in 1963 the chapel was filled with individuals in personal prayer, with the murmur of weeping, the wiping away of tears, students shocked by the assassination of John F. Kennedy. No one had announced that students should gather there; going into that space was the most natural thing to do in that tragic circumstance. I joined them for a time, praying, and then went to work with my camera to record the saddest of days for the campus newspaper. 

Later in my college years, another weekday afternoon, I sat alone in an upper transept pew, my Vespers choir seat. I had just gotten word that my third strike meant I was out. I wasn’t a bad student. It’s just that I was better at extra-curriculars, like the radio station, campus publications, various college organizations. I had spent more time in the radio studio and the campus dark room than in the library or at my desk. Academic probation times three equals suspension for a semester. Here I was, heeding a call to ministry, knowing that graduate school awaited me after college, and if I couldn’t get through college…how would I tell my church and those who had encouraged me there? How was I going to tell Dad? And my roommate would be stuck with a semester’s rent if I were gone. Maybe not the most important part of the equation, but there it was. So, I had gone into the chapel to see if God had anything to say. I’m not sure I prayed; I think I just listened. And that sanctuary was mine, all mine.

I had flunked out. After a semester away, I returned to Westminster, dropped out of most extra-curriculars, leaned on Joan whom I had met thanks to the college choir connections, and recovered academically. And the chapel sanctuary played a new role in my life. I preached my first sermons there. Jud McConnell invited us “pre-mins” to lead daily chapel services occasionally. When we arrived at school as “freshmen” the student body faced “daily required chapel.” Toward the end of our college careers, that requirement was lifted, and optional services drew much smaller numbers a couple of times a week. When students were invited to lead the service, we had to design the order of worship, invite others to help lead, and then deliver the “meditation” or short sermon. I led the service at least a couple of times. 

I still have a note I received from Jud McConnell following one of my services. (I saved a lot of those notes throughout my ministry, a kind of ego-file.) Jud wrote something to the effect that he was impressed with my leadership, that I had a commanding voice, and that he hoped that with that voice, I would always have something inspiring to say. If I’d had my doubts about ministry the year before, those doubts were erased by Jud’s kind words of encouragement in my senior year. 

Wallace Memorial Chapel, a sanctuary for me in more ways than one.