Marsh Chapel, the Soul of Boston University, Kicks Off Its 75th Anniversary Celebration This Weekend

Marsh Chapel, the Soul of Boston University, Kicks Off Its 75th Anniversary Celebration This Weekend

Highlights include a sermon by US Senator Raphael Warnock in November

Kimberly Macdonald joined the Marsh Chapel Choir at Boston University during her freshman year, in 2001. Macdonald (CFA'04, COM'23) is still singing in the choir 24 years later, as the chapel, opened in 1950, celebrates its 75th anniversary.

"The chapel choir is a spiritual home for me and many of my fellow singers and alumni," says Macdonald, the BU School of Theology marketing and communications director. "I've grown up with this choir. It is the intergenerational community that has been the most steadfast and solid throughout my entire adult life. We've seen each other through job changes, moves across the globe, getting married and having children, loves and losses, successes and failures." Macdonald's choir mates sang at her wedding in 2013.

Marsh Chapel, BU's religious center, will spend this academic year observing its diamond anniversary, having evoked the glory of God architecturally, with its vaulted ceiling, stained glass, and buttresses, for those 75 years. But in Macdonald and the generations of people who have gathered here-to pray, sing, marry, bury loved ones, bid graduates farewell at the annual Baccalaureate, and mark historic national events like 9/11 on Marsh Plaza-the chapel incarnates St. Irenaeus' definition of God's glory: human beings "fully alive."

"Personal holiness and social holiness both converge here," says the Rev. Robert Allan Hill, the chapel's dean since 2006 and the sixth person to hold that position; he is also a School of Theology professor. "We express a deep personal faith and an active social involvement [that are] mutually enriching."

The marquee anniversary event will be a Service of Celebration on November 16 featuring the Rev. Raphael Warnock, Georgia's senior US senator. Warnock, holder of a PhD from Union Theological Seminary, is the senior pastor of Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church-once copastored by Boston University's most illustrious alum, Martin Luther King, Jr. (GRS'55, Hon.'59). The year of observances, which includes a fundraising effort to endow the chapel deanship, begins this Alumni Weekend (September 25 to 28), when Marsh's Sunday service will reunite 35 alumni members of the chapel choir to sing, Macdonald says.

(Check below for other anniversary-related events.)

Hill describes Marsh as "the leading pulpit in Methodism globally and nationally." That status owes in large part to the storied figures who have presided inside these limestone walls and the adjacent School of Theology. They include the Rev. Howard Thurman (Hon.'67), Marsh Chapel dean from 1953 to 1965 and the first Black dean at any mostly white US university; King, who during his BU studies found in Thurman a crucial mentor; and the man from whom Hill got his middle name, Allan Knight Chalmers, a BU School of Theology professor and a prominent civil rights leader.

Traditional ministry, adapting to the times

While anchoring BU's religious life and traditions, Marsh Chapel has evolved with the country's and the University's expanding religious diversity. Hill works with nine BU chaplains, serving various denominations and student cohorts (the Muslim chaplaincy expanded last year). These chaplains and a half dozen staffers oversee a wide range of functions within these limestone walls that extend beyond Sunday worship.

Just a few examples: weekly community dinners open to all students; weekly arts and crafts sessions, to help leaven academic pressures; twice-weekly tai chi classes; a Wednesday Eucharist service cum casual dinner; the Inner Strength Gospel Choir; the University's Catholic masses; and hosting various BU-affiliated gatherings and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.

As Hill prepares to mark his 20th anniversary at Marsh, he carries emotionally deep-hued memories, one involving a national tragedy that touched BU. In 2013, the Boston Marathon bombings killed BU student Lu Lingzi (GRS'13). A packed, livestreamed memorial service at the George Sherman Union included 18 grieving members of Lingzi's family from China. Hill sat in the second row, "watching to make sure everything that we hoped to plan out was going through." All went according to script until the end. The family, who were to process out, didn't move.

"There was this long silence," Hill says. "I thought, did we forget something? The family-they were all dressed in black-walked up on stage and looked out at the global audience and at those present, and then-it could only occur in the moment-bowed, and held the bow for a long time," in gratitude to the community that was helping them mourn.

But Marsh's religious mission has also encompassed lighter moments, including one year's Easter Vigil service, where baptisms were being performed. "We had a student from Canada," Hill recalls, "who said, 'I want to be immersed. I want it to be not just water on the head, but underwater, bodily.'" A brief consideration of immersion in the Charles River was dismissed, so instead a chapel assistant got a small pool and filled it outside, with the temperature hovering around 40 degrees.

"We went out in the middle of the service on the side lawn and put this young fellow under water," Hill says. "He was chilly, but baptized."

Marsh Chapel, the center of religious life at BU, was built to welcome students and staff of all faiths, not just the historic Methodism of its founding. Photo by Bob O'Connor

Built to withstand an earthquake

During construction in the late 1940s, builders assured BU President Daniel Marsh (STH 1908, Hon.'53) that his namesake $1 million chapel would stand for a millennium. The University's trustees christened the chapel in recognition of Marsh's dual role as a man of learning and of faith: the president was also a Methodist minister who viewed a campus chapel "not as a luxury, but as a necessity." The cornerstone contains devotional books-Protestant, Catholic, Jewish-placed there by Marsh. The stained glass windows include references to each of those faiths. The ecumenism honors BU's rejection of quotas for Jewish and other minority students, with Marsh pointing out that BU had "more Jews than Brandeis and more Catholics than Boston College."

Three years after its opening, Thurman became chapel dean, his groundbreaking appointment drawing media attention, which, along with his dynamic sermons, filled Marsh's pews each Sunday.

Over ensuing decades, BU made Marsh Chapel and Marsh Plaza the communal gathering place to grieve tragedies and exult over triumphs. The day after King's 1968 assassination, a huge crowd mourned him at a memorial outside the chapel. And Marsh Chapel would become the sinew connecting that era's Vietnam War turmoil with healing decades later. In 1970, the National Guard killing of four students at Kent State University protesting the Vietnam War, and the resulting unrest at BU and nationwide, led the University to cancel Commencement. Exactly 40 years later, BU gave the Class of 1970 a belated ceremony, including a chapel memorial service for deceased classmates.

A soloist led the crowd in Let It Be, unleashing class members' tears over their missed graduation, which Hill-looking back in 2020-called "a 40-year grief that finally got healed."

Last year, the chapel was the site of a service of prayer and thanksgiving on the occasion of Melissa Gilliam's inauguration as BU's 11th president.

As for the future-Marsh was built for a millennium-Hill puts his faith in the students and worshipers inspired by this place, who will undertake "the preaching of the Gospel, broadly construed…not just Christian traditions only, but in the full panoply of religious life."

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