Boston University's Marsh Chapel: A Diamond Anniversary of Faith, Architecture, and Social Justice

Marsh Chapel, Boston University's religious center, is observing its diamond anniversary, marking 75 years of architectural grandeur and spiritual significance. Since its dedication in 1949, the chapel has served as a place of worship, reflection, and community for students, faculty, and alumni.

Architectural Evocation of Glory

The chapel's architectural design evokes the glory of God with its vaulted ceiling, stained glass, and buttresses. Designed by Ralph Adams Cram in the Gothic style, Marsh Chapel was intended to be a place of worship for all, though firmly rooted in the university's Methodist tradition.

Ralph Adams Cram and the Collegiate Gothic Style

In 1920, the university purchased 15 acres along the Charles River, hiring architect Ralph Adams Cram to produce a master plan for the new campus. Cram was the high priest of collegiate Gothic, exemplified in his designs for Princeton, Rice University, and, eventually, Marsh Chapel: thoroughly medieval, vault-and-buttress-based spaces with a touch of Art Deco streamlining. Construction of the new chapel, however, was delayed by the Great Depression and World War II; BU President Daniel L. Marsh ended up spending the bulk of his term shepherding the project. By the time of the chapel’s dedication, Cram had been dead for eight years.

A Millennium of Existence

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.”

Design Elements

The walls are built from Indiana limestone, its tile floors carved from Italian, Belgium, Spanish, Tennessee, and Vermont marble. Its stained glass windows on the east side of the chapel represent Judaism, Catholicism, Protestantism and Methodism and books from Protestant, Catholic and Jewish traditions were placed inside the chapel’s cornerstone before it was sealed. The cornerstone contains devotional books-Protestant, Catholic, Jewish-placed there by Marsh. The stained glass windows include references to each of those faiths. Marsh believed that religion should never restrict academic freedom, he says. As a result, representations of faith and learning converge throughout the chapel. Visitors find images of Saints John the Baptist, John, Paul, and Peter alongside Horace Mann, Booker T. Washington, Alexander Graham Bell, and Abraham Lincoln. And it’s no coincidence that the College of Arts & Sciences and the School of Theology flank the chapel. “This is our way of saying architecturally that religion is most effective when it permeates education, and education is most safe when it is infused with the spirit of true religion,” Marsh wrote. Although the figures of Jesus Christ and the four Evangelists are carved on a wooden screen behind the pulpit, no cross appears in the chancel. “The absence of this symbol is very deliberate,” according to Hill. The Casavant Organ Opus 2000, designed by Casavant Frères of Quebec, Canada. Marsh Chapel’s Rose Window was designed by stained glass artist Charles Connick.

A Spiritual Home for Generations

Marsh Chapel has been a spiritual home for 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.

The Chapel Choir

Rev. Kimberly Macdonald joined the Marsh Chapel Choir at Boston University during her freshman year, in 2001. “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.

Anniversary Events

The marquee anniversary event will be a Service of Celebration on November 16 featuring the Rev. Raphael Warnock, 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)-and Georgia’s junior US senator. 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. In addition to the September 28 service reuniting former choir members to sing, on another, to-be-determined, Sunday, an organ-and-choir anthem that was composed for Marsh’s 1950 dedication, “Behold, I Build an House,” will be performed by the choir. On October 19, a private Marsh Chapel Women’s Gathering will be held from 12:30 to 2 pm on the 17th floor of the Duan Family Center for Computing & Data Sciences, says event organizer Jan Hill, Dean Hill’s wife. In addition, says Hill, an exhibition at the chapel to honor the 75th Anniversary will display some memorabilia for this Alumni Weekend, September 25-28, and also on November 16 for the 75th anniversary’s marquis event: a sermon at Marsh’s 11 am Sunday worship by US Senator Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.), senior pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, the church once copastored by Martin Luther King, Jr.

Music at Marsh Chapel

In the spiritual category, music will feature prominently at a chapel whose choir has recorded CDs and performed at iconic off-campus locales like Trinity Church Wall Street. This Sunday, the Masterworks Chorale performs Lukas Foss’s “Behold! I Build an House,” composed for the March 1950 dedication of Boston University’s Marsh Chapel. The piece, a setting of texts from the second book of Chronicles concerning the commissioning and consecration of the temple in Jerusalem, is an artifact of Boston architectural history. It also marked a generational changing of the Bostonian musical guard. Foss’s was not the only piece commissioned for the occasion. Everett Titcomb’s “Dedication,” setting much the same text that Foss did, was, perhaps, the more expected contribution. Titcomb was a Boston church music institution. A Massachusetts native, Titcomb had been organist and choirmaster at St. John the Evangelist on Bowdoin Street since 1910. He and Cram had been close; Cram had sang in Titcomb’s choir, and the two had become friends, united by a skepticism of modernism and a love of high Anglican pomp and rectitude. Foss, though, was thoroughly modern. Born in Berlin in 1922, he had emigrated, first to Paris, and then, in 1937, to the United States. Summers of study with Boston Symphony Orchestra music director Serge Koussevitzky at Tanglewood had led to Foss’s appointment as the BSO’s pianist; the 1944 premiere of his cantata “The Prairie” had established Foss as a composer to watch, combining the American neo-classicism of musicians like Aaron Copland and Roy Harris with touches of complex expressionism derived from the European avant-garde. Titcomb’s style was polished and stately; Foss’s, polyglot and brash. The bright, dissonant organ chords and quietly restless tangle of counterpoint that open “Behold! I Build an House” signal the forthright, teeming temple Foss imagined.

A Hub for Social Justice and Inclusivity

Marsh Chapel has played a significant role in the University's and the country's social and political landscape. It has been a place of mourning, protest, and celebration, reflecting the University's commitment to social justice and inclusivity.

Howard Thurman and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Between 1953 and 1965, African-American theologian Howard Thurman presided the chapel as its dean. Thurman, the first Black dean to serve at a predominantly white University, was a mentor to Martin Luther King, Jr.

Key Moments in History

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.

A Place for All Faiths

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. 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).

The Vision of Daniel Marsh

Like BU, Marsh Chapel is deeply rooted in Methodism. But from the beginning, Marsh intended the chapel to be a place of worship for people of all religious convictions. This idea is reflected in the four stained glass windows on the east side of the chapel, representing Judaism, Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, and Methodism. Before sealing the chapel’s cornerstone, Marsh placed Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Jewish books of devotion inside. “They are meant to symbolize that this chapel, in its very fundamental conception, is intended to be a house of prayer for all people,” he wrote.

The Modern Marsh Chapel

Today, Marsh Chapel continues to be a vital part of Boston University, serving as a center for religious life, social justice, and community engagement.

Read also: History of the BU Bridge

Robert Allan Hill and the Modern Mission

“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. 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.

Community and Inclusivity

As decades passed and the University became more diverse, Marsh’s vision of an ecumenical community began to take shape. Today, Hill oversees 30 religious life groups and seven University chaplains. “The word ‘university’ means unity in diversity,” says Brother Lawrence Whitney (STH’08,’11), chaplain for community life. The liturgies are ecumenical and nonfundamentalist. “We preach a gospel of grace and freedom, a responsible Christian liberalism,” Hill says.

Endowing the Future

Key among the former is a $4.5 million fund drive to endow the chapel deanship. “We really need a fund about five times [the chapel’s current resources] to sustain everything that we’re doing,” says the Rev.

Livestreaming Services

Marsh Chapel began livestreaming its Sunday services on June 4, 2023.

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