SANCTUARY of memories

THE AUGUSTANA CHAPEL’S ENDURING IMPACT ON SPIRITUAL FORMATION

By Pastor Erik Christensen

As you enter the Augustana Chapel there is, immediately to your left, a large glass plaque affixed over a metallic backing. It lists the names of major donors to the campaign that funded the massive renovation of LSTC’s south building and created the Augustana Chapel, the Roby Prayer Chapel, and sacristy. These spaces have served the seminary’s worship and spiritual life for nearly

20 years. It is not the feature that immediately grabs your attention. That would be the magnificent Ruth and Paul Manz Organ along the chapel’s west wall, or the stunning stained-glass panels in rainbow hues along the south wall facing 55th Street, or the modern granite baptismal font with its flowing waters continually falling into the pool that became the threshold for students entering and leaving LSTC each year. Instead, these names stand behind and alongside those ushers and greeters who have welcomed people to worship, day after day and year after year. Many who donated to the campaign are well known to the LSTC community because of their service on the faculty, names that are synonymous with a certain era of the seminary’s life: Marilyn and Ralph Klein, Kristi and Mark Bangert, Donna Skinner and James Kenneth Echols, Cathy and Craig Satterlee. Others are former board members, alumni and supporters of the seminary, and congregations with strong ties to LSTC. Their names appear not as signs of ownership, but as witnesses to a vision for the community’s worship and its central place in the life of the seminary and the formation of leaders for the church.

Like any sanctuary, this space has held our community together in moments of ordinary worship as well as extraordinary joy and grief. Here students, staff, and faculty have preached God’s liberating word and been fed at Christ’s table. Children have been baptized in this font. Students have been married in this chapel. Pastors and deacons have been ordained within its walls. Choirs and recitalists have filled its chamber with music. Beloved friends, family, and colleagues have been commended to God’s eternal care and accompanied with song on their journey through the grave and into new life.

In recent years, over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, it became increasingly common for us to hold memorial services in Augustana Chapel for family members of our international student community who were unable to travel home to attend services at the time of death. Blending ancient ritual with modern technology, we have been able to host people in Augustana Chapel and online so that the assembly could receive the eulogies and testimonies of those separated from us by great distances in real time. In these and so many other ways, this chapel has served the purposes intended by those who made its creation possible and has done so magnificently.

Of course, those who graduated from LSTC prior to the turn of this century have fond memories of a very different chapel and were formed for leadership within its walls. Likewise, it has been exciting to collaborate with the architects, engineers, and interior designers on the plans for the new chapel being built this summer in what will be LSTC’s new home on the fourth floor of Catholic Theological Union. It, too, will feature expansive windows looking south and west over Hyde Park and will incorporate elements of the existing chapel–like the beautiful stained-glass panels–into its design. As the seminary prepares for this next chapter in our story, our worship program is being redesigned to meet the changing needs of a community that is both residential and remote, onsite and online. What will not change is the central role of worship in the life of the seminary and the formation of new leaders for a renewed church.