Finding Promise When Closing A Chapel
Photo of Chapel of the Cross at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minn.
During the opening convocation ceremonies in the fall of 2010, a guest speaker or professor, I can’t quite remember whom, told me and my fellow incoming seminary students that we would be presiding over the funeral of the church. Hardly a motivational speech, I remember feeling shocked by these words as I glanced across the pews at my apparent co-presiders, peers that I’d soon call friends. I heard the presenter's words as a summons, not a scare, and I remember thinking to myself, “If anyone has something to say about what happens after death, it’s us.”
As Christians, we have a clear theology about what happens at death … new life. Loss, yes, grief, yes. But in the midst of despair we proclaim the Easter promise that death does not have the final word; the final word belongs to God and that word is resurrection.
I had to remind myself of this promise nearly a decade later as I sat in my office this week watching the livestream worship service as the seminary I attended, Luther Seminary in Minnesota decommissioned one of its most hallowed rooms that formed many pastors and formed me. I long knew the day was coming.
For years now selling parts of the physical campus was discerned and discussed. As an aluma I witnessed these realities unfold from the sidelines, unsurprised and largely unbothered by the realities of a changing church.
But today as I saw the chapel slowly fill with familiar faces, beloved professors, students, pastors, and friends, my body told me what my mind had tried to reason away. I wept as I worshipped, albeit from a far, one final time in this sacred space.
The Chapel of the Cross had always been one of my favorite places on campus; whenever I pulled open its heavy doors, a holy hush fell over me. The quiet and somber sanctuary demanded reverence as a hauntingly honest sculpture of Christ Crucified hung at the center of the space between the pews and among the people.
Like many, the Chapel of the Cross was where I learned to love and lead the liturgy. It’s where I learned to preside and to preach. As is true for all spaces, it had its limitations and frustrations, especially in lacking accessibility and adaptability, but I never imagined the chapel ceasing to exist.
As former Bishop Jon Anderson preached, his words carried both pain and promise. “Not even our holy places are permanent” he announced, and with that I could feel my heart unclenching and I took a deep, long breath in. I repeated the words out loud “Not even our holy places are permanent.”
Over the last two years we’ve come to know this reality intensely. The holy places of full church sanctuaries and in-person staff meetings, food-filled fellowship hours and intimate small groups, were once so familiar that they felt like secure structures, as reliable and sturdy as the pews bolted to the sanctuary floors. But the pandemic hollowed out our holy places, forcing us to be more malleable and adaptable than we thought possible, strengthening muscles for change that we never knew we had.
I, for one, needed this painful push into the postmodern world where virtual communities hold sacred space just as beautiful and honest as Chapel of the Cross. And while I will cherish the memories made in that remarkable chapel, I trust that in this small death, there will be new life.
I don’t fear the changes that the church is facing. I started seminary over a decade ago and already so much has changed … and thank God for that. But the closing of this chapel and the similar closings of seminaries, camps, schools, and congregations feel like tangible signs of a deeper reality, that the church may have to lay to rest many of its buildings, cultural privilege, and institutional power in order to make a way for the new life that is being born among us.
As one who has given birth relatively recently, I know how dangerous birth can be. I know the fear that birth brings. I know the sacrifice and pain that it requires. I know the blood and the breaking. I know what it feels like to second-guess my strength.
But I also know the incredible moment when new life emerges and it feels like everything has changed, and yet somehow, everything is exactly how it should be.
That is the prayer I have for the church, that we come to see in these moments of death a new life that is being born or resurrected (Is it Advent or Easter? You decide). I pray that we can catch up to the Spirit that is surely at work ahead of us — in our communities inside and especially outside the church walls, through creative seminary students, and at the hands and hearts of its faithful lay leaders.
The church has survived centuries of schisms, shifts, and swings, and I have faith that the church will continue faithfully today and tomorrow. I am reminded of a much loved saying from Dag Hammarskjöld, a Swedish diplomat and the second Secretary General of the United Nations. “For all that has been, thanks. For all that shall be, yes.”
