2013 Seminar | St. Olaf Campus Ministry, Northfield, MN

February 24, 2014

Opening Wide Our Chapel Doors: Transitioning a Hallway for Worship and the World


By John Schwehn, M.Div. ‘13

St. Olaf, a liberal arts college of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), reminded those gathered at this year’s conference that faith takes root and form within the spaces we inhabit every day.  Sitting high upon a hill in an otherwise flat Northfield, Minnesota, St. Olaf is itself a space that, since its founding in 1874, seeks to be a place where students may explore their vocations in a community of higher education.  At the center of this campus space stands Boe Memorial Chapel, where daily worship is held for all who wish to attend.  Within the limestone chapel is a hallway, a critical passageway for students racing hither and yon throughout the day.  This hallway – which runs through a chapel that sits on a campus that’s built on a hill in Northfield, MN – was the question that the pastor and musician of the St. Olaf student congregation presented to participants in the Congregations Project Summer Seminar.  This hallway, narrow both in dimensions (15’ x 42’) and focus, challenged us all to consider anew the power that everyday spaces possess.

Campus pastor Matt Marohl and musician James Bobb began their plenary presentation by setting aside the concerns that often drive conversations about evangelism.  At St. Olaf, worship attendance is not dwindling, the student body is not spiritually disengaged, and programming is not seen as disconnected from the realities of students’ lives.  According to Marhohl and Bobb, students do come to worship; students do utilize the pastor’s office; students do desire a life of faith.  Many clearly want college to be a time to live into their faith.  What difference can a public space make to an engaged and inquisitive community such as this? 

Enter: the hallway.

Also serving as the chapel’s small narthex space, the hallway at the heart of this project is a short section of the most highly trafficked corridor on the St. Olaf campus.  After spanning the width of the chapel space, the hallway continues on through a glass passageway to the area containing every student’s mailbox and then on to the commons, the only place on campus to get three meals a day.  After that, it winds onward to the library.  Out of pure necessity, a majority of the small student body walks directly through the chapel each day, many of them on their way to the building where the thousand-plus students who participate in the school’s several musical ensembles go for rehearsals.   

Marohl and Bobb are hoping to transform such an unavoidable, though unexamined, portion of the chapel space into another opportunity for inviting students more deeply into a life of faith.  Their challenge, and ours, was to consider simple methods with which to transform a mundane, functional thoroughfare into a space that might instead cause students to pause, if only for a moment.  Faculty member Maggi Dawn began our conversation by reflecting on how spaces might be reframed through the introduction of the unusual within the ordinary.  All spaces, and especially sacred spaces, put us in particular relationship to our neighbors and our place in the world.  How, therefore, might a simple reconfiguration of a familiar space invite students to see it differently?  How might it become a space that feels fresh, alive, and sacred? 

Marohl and Bobb have noticed two things about students in their initial experiments with this space.  First, students will take things if you put them there.  Nothing quite captures a busy college student’s attention like a “Free Stuff” sign!  But what if the stuff were meaningful, challenging, or thought-provoking, rather than frivolous and cheap, destined for a dormitory drawer?  What free books, poems, or devotions might be offered here?  Second, St. Olaf students are always energized by opportunities to serve.  Service is inextricably linked to the life of faith God calls us all to follow; perhaps this hallway can serve as yet another space on campus where students can begin to make this connection.  The sounds of worship, practicing organists, and rehearsing choirs often infuse the space. In addition, seminar participants suggested a rotation of visual or tactile additions to the space—fabric, photographs— that might prompt reflection on liturgical themes or global issues.  Together, we wondered if students would be willing to slow down to write a note or draw a picture in response to a prompt, gradually adding their questions or testimonies to a thought-provoking tapestry.

Thinking about a narrow hallway in a college chapel opened Summer Seminar participants to consider how we, as church, might capture the imaginations of all who travel through migratory spaces, waiting for invitations.  The hallway leads not only through the chapel.  It also leads into it, and out.  As such, it is a liminal space through which hundreds of faculty, students, and staff pass each week: a 15’ passageway that leads from the sanctuary to the chapel doors, from worship to world.  This space is witness to the countless saints that have walked its floors for generations.  The St. Olaf project raises the hope that it may also bear witness as a space for learning, invitation, surprise, reflection, and communion with God in the present generation.