Boston University

Boston University was a major setting for Howard Thurman’s effort to bring spiritual formation into university life. As dean of the chapel and professor of spiritual disciplines, he treated worship not as an obligation separate from intellectual work but as a way to address the human spirit and deepen religious searching. The university gave him room to develop this work, while the growth of the chapel’s audience eventually exposed a limit to that freedom: its trustees would not grant an independent church board, and Thurman ultimately left the deanship.

Appointment and Institutional Purpose

After ten years at the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples, Thurman accepted an invitation to become dean of the chapel and professor of spiritual disciplines at Boston University. The move extended his work from a congregation to a university community. He explained his departure to his former congregation in terms of reach: shaping a congregation within a university, he argued, could affect young people who would later carry their responsibilities into communities around the world. The change of setting was therefore part of his plan to circulate his religious ideas more widely, not simply a change of post.

The university promised Thurman a free hand to develop the chapel program. His first Sunday worship bulletin set out an inclusive purpose for the service: it should address the deepest needs and aspirations of the human spirit without undermining the religious context that gave meaning to an individual’s life. Instead, worship was meant to deepen an existing quest for spiritual reality. The chapel was presented both as a place for stimulation, challenge, and dedication and as a sign that the university recognized religion as fundamental to human life.

Worship and Spiritual Formation

Thurman’s chapel program joined communal worship to inward attention. At Howard University, before his Boston appointment, he had experimented with silent periods for meditation and prayer and with liturgical dance. That earlier work shows a practical continuity in his approach: worship could involve silence and artistic forms as well as spoken instruction. At Boston University, the bulletin likewise framed the chapel as a place where spiritual searching could be taken seriously without requiring worshipers to abandon their own religious setting.

His teaching gave this purpose a sustained academic form. Disciplines of the Spirit grew out of a course he taught at Boston University, built on his conviction that the raw material of daily experience could become the context for an encounter with God. The course unfolded across two semesters. The first studied religious experience, especially Christian religious experience; the second considered suffering, tragedy, and love as experiences through which a person might be brought into God’s presence. Spiritual formation thus began with the circumstances of life rather than with an expectation of spectacular religious events.

The course also emphasized that change could be gradual and difficult to date. Thurman described yielding to the center as a process that might proceed silently and slowly, until a person found that former difficulties had become easier or that actions once considered acceptable were no longer possible. In this account, transformation did not depend on a single dramatic occasion. A gradual reorientation of life could become apparent only in retrospect. The course connected study of religious experience to this longer work of shaping conduct and purpose.

A Widening Public and Institutional Limits

Attendance at the chapel grew to include Boston University students, students from other schools in the area, and people with no university connection. This widening audience suggests that the chapel’s appeal reached beyond its formal campus role. Its services and spiritual program drew participants from different educational settings, while Thurman’s stated purpose emphasized a religious encounter capacious enough to speak to people’s existing quests rather than replace them.

As that public gathered, some attendees sought to establish their own church board. The university trustees refused, fearing that such a board would take control away from the institution. The dispute marked a practical boundary between the chapel’s expanding communal life and the university’s authority over it. Thurman eventually resigned as dean and became university minister at large. Boston University had offered space for an ambitious program of worship and spiritual education; the disagreement over governance showed that its institutional support did not extend to transferring control of the growing community to its participants. His departure changed his position, but the university’s role in his work remained visible in the course and chapel program he had developed there.