It serves the university by hosting
major events in the life of the community
and its members and by attending
to the
University’s motto – eruditio et
religio – by
keeping the heart of the university listening to
the heart of God.
It serves students by convening, overseeing and contributing
to a dynamic and diverse culture of religious life
on campus, and seeking to model respectful and enriching engagement
in the context of profound difference.
It serves the American church by offering vibrant interdenominational
worship characterized by a strong tradition of choral
and organ music, preaching, and liturgy and by seeking to model
a form of mission and engagement that is faithful
and appropriate to a rapidly changing university and social culture.
It serves the wider community of the Triangle, the state
and beyond by being present in and contributing to
issues and questions of the common good in appropriate and imaginative
ways and by attending to the needs and interests
visitors drawn by hospital stays or tourism.
In 2007 the Dean and Associate Dean
of Duke Chapel issued a report
entitled The Chapel and Religious
Life at Duke:
Some Issues and Proposals. There they identified
what they called the “Three Chapter Story” as
vital to understanding the context of ministry
and mission at Duke
today.
In the Prologue (pre-1900) colleges
and universities were founded, shaped
and dominated by the major Christian
traditions
to shape and foster their and their society’s
leaders and values.
In Chapter One (c.1900-50) the churches traded their theological
identity on most of these campuses in
order to retain their institutional influence. It is remembered as a period when
the stranglehold of white Anglo-Saxon
control
was tightened and the common interest among the dominant churches, institutions
and social groups was overwhelming.
Chapter Two (c.1950-80) is remembered as a revolt against
privilege and hierarchy of any kind,
and a statement of a profound confidence in the untrammeled will of the individual
when given free expression.
We are now in Chapter Three, often experienced as a struggle
between those who mourn (or deny) the
passing of chapter one and those who mourn (or deny) the passing of chapter
two.
Duke Chapel understands chapter
three to mean the following.
It means using “Christian” as
a noun rather than an adjective.
It means seeing the role
of the church
primarily
in building accountable
communities that embody
and practice the virtues
of faith,
hope and
love, and
secondarily in
speaking truth in the face
of injustice, oppression
and fear; but
never in seeking social
control over those who
are not and have no desire
to be Christians.
It means
being content
to
be a voice among other
voices in the
public square.
It means engaging with
other faith traditions
assuming it
has a lot
to learn from them. It
means speaking only after
it has listened. But it
does
not exclude
taking
authority when
called upon
to do so. It does not assume
power is inherently bad.
And it does not think
that there can ever
be a set of institutional
arrangements that can guarantee
religious and social wellbeing
without active participation
from all parties
in a conversation
about what constitutes
the good.
Duke Chapel’s strengths
include the following
A magnificent Gothic sanctuary
with a landmark tower located at the
most prominent point
on an impressive university campus.
An honored place in the
culture of a thriving top-ten national
research university.
(The university has historic United Methodist connections; the Chapel, by contrast,
has always
been interdenominational.)
A religious culture in the American South where Protestant
Christianity is very
widely practiced.
A strong United Methodist-affiliated Divinity School located
only yards away,
currently among the most prominent in the USA.
A tradition of several generations of outstanding choral
music (with a choir
of 100-150), organs and organists of international standard, dignified liturgy,
charismatic
deans, a line of famous visiting preachers,
and
healthy relationships across faith traditions.
Together these make it
by
some distance the most visible
Chapel
among
leading research
universities
in
the USA. Regular Sunday
attendance during semesters
is around 1000, rising
to
1500 for special occasions and
3500 for Easter.
The challenges facing
the
Chapel that affect all
our
medium- and long-term planning
include
the following:
The real and proportional
decline of the mainline denominations
from the youth upward. We can no longer
expect a substantial number of our
incoming
classes to
be committed Methodists,
Presbyterians, Episcopalians and Lutherans.
Meanwhile the student body is becoming
significantly
more
diverse racially
and the emerging groups tend not to
fit immediately
into traditional religious
silos.
The university culture, while giving encouragement to Christianity,
is best described as plural rather than secular. That is, there is immense goodwill
toward initiatives,
such
as our
new
Faith Council, that take religious diversity seriously. The days when people
thought a secular
consensus
would
prevail and religion
would just fade away in the modern world seem to be gone. But religions gain
more public
credibility when they acknowledge
graciously that they
are not the only one.
There is an emerging culture of applauding service outside
the framework of religious faith. In the past service seemed
to be the part of religion that the secular world could most
easily stomach; now there seems to be an increasingly rounded
non-religious ethos, which combines a drive for excellence
with a general impulse to “give
something back.”
The proliferation of religious life groups has the adverse
effect that there is serious shortage of administrative, programming, storage
and informal
worship
space
for them in and around Duke
Chapel.
Duke Chapel is as exciting a
context as any
in which to participate in
and address the
opportunities and challenges
facing
faith
in general and Christianity
in particular
in contemporary
America.
It has a highly
talented and motivated
staff and is
widely admired and envied. It
works hard
to
be an exemplary
institution in worship, music,
ministry, mission,
and interfaith
engagement.
It looks to
the future with
faith,
gratitude, and
hope.
Web site provided by Friends of Duke Chapel and Chapel Annual Fund
