"That Room": Augustana Chapel and the Preparation of Leaders for the Church (Essay‪)‬

(1) At least once a week, Mark Bangert and I chat about how worship forms Christians and, more particularly, about how seminary chapel does and does not prepare our students for ministry. As professors of liturgy and homiletics, we are very skilled at opining on how preparation did and did not happen on any given day. When I was a student in Notre Dame's doctoral program in liturgical studies, my Lutheran colleagues and I often mused that we were devoting our lives to the study of adiaphora, "ceremonies or ecclesiastical practices that are neither commanded nor forbidden in God's Word but that were introduced in the churches for the sake of good order and decorum." (2) Are the adiaphora that happen in chapel really worth worrying about? Wading through the often conflicting demands of seminary worship, I am frequently tempted to approach chapel as an auxiliary, even secondary, part of the curriculum, and to submit that "the community of God in every place and at every time has the authority to alter such ceremonies according to its own situation, as may be most useful and edifying for the community of God." (3) Taking this approach to the extreme, worship becomes a reflection of the community; anything goes as long as "the Gospel is purely preached and the holy sacraments are administered according to the Gospel." (4) While this approach is certainly theologically sound, it overlooks the power of worship to form Christians, communities, and leaders for the Church. Worship as formation