Howard University was the institutional setting for Howard Thurman’s attempt to make worship answer to the deepest needs of students while opening religious experience beyond conventional forms. As a faculty member in its School of Religion and later dean of the chapel, he treated the university not simply as a place to hold services but as a community in which new forms of worship could be tested. His experiments joined contemplative practice and the arts, and made the chapel a setting for exploring whether shared religious experience could cross divisions among people.

Setting and Appointment

Thurman joined the faculty of the School of Religion at Howard University in Washington, D.C., which the account identifies as a leading university for African American students. He was later appointed dean of the chapel. The role brought a practical challenge: students needed to be drawn into chapel with genuine enthusiasm, rather than attending resentfully. Thurman responded by experimenting with the form of worship itself, seeking ways for services to engage students instead of relying on familiar routines alone.

His approach drew on his study of mystics at Haverford College. He introduced periods of silence for meditation and prayer, making quiet attention part of a public university service. He also incorporated liturgical dance. Its first performer was a Roman Catholic woman who taught at a Catholic school in Baltimore. These additions placed different modes of expression alongside one another: stillness and movement, individual reflection and worship shared with a congregation. The chapel became a place where spiritual practice could be experienced through more than spoken instruction.

The Chapel as an Artistic Experiment

Thurman extended his use of the arts through a presentation of living Madonnas. He chose six European masterpieces depicting the Madonna and arranged for live participants to reproduce the paintings on stage. The design depended on close attention to each image: costumes, colors, background elements, and lighting were organized to make the staged versions correspond as exactly as possible to the originals.

A nine-by-five-foot frame stood behind which each life-sized tableau was presented in turn. The sequence gave each image its own interval: there was a period of silence between presentations, and “Ave Maria” was played for each display. Rather than treating the paintings as illustrations to a spoken explanation, the service made looking, listening, and waiting part of the worship. Its carefully ordered elements—frame, tableau, music, and silence—gave the congregation time to attend to each scene.

The service succeeded, and Thurman understood that success as more than an effective performance. He described the congregation and participants as brought together in a moment of spiritual transcendence. For him, the experience suggested that worship could make unity among people more compelling than the forces that separated them. The staged paintings thus served both as an artistic experiment and as a way to explore a central concern of his religious life: whether an encounter with God could change how people experienced their relation to one another.

Departure and Institutional Afterlife

In 1945, a Presbyterian minister in San Francisco invited Thurman to lead a proposed intercultural church in which white, Black, Asian, and Latino members would participate as equals. After deliberating with his family, Thurman accepted. At the dinner marking the close of his time at Howard University, Eleanor Roosevelt was the featured speaker; she later became an associate member of the new Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples, as did other people who lived far from San Francisco. The dinner connects Thurman’s university work to his next institutional undertaking, where he would continue to place worship at the center of an effort to bring people across social divisions together.

After ten years at the Fellowship church, Thurman accepted an invitation to become dean of the chapel and professor of spiritual disciplines at Boston University. He was promised freedom to develop that chapel program as he wished. He explained his departure from the San Francisco congregation by arguing that a university setting could bring the ideas he believed in to hundreds of young people who would later carry responsibilities in communities around the world. The account therefore presents the Howard appointment as one important phase in a larger effort to use educational and religious institutions as settings for spiritual formation.

The chapel’s institutional life also changed as attendance grew. Students from Howard University and other nearby schools came, as did people with no university connection. Some of these attendees wanted their own church board, but the university trustees refused, fearing that they would lose control. Thurman eventually resigned as dean of the chapel and became university minister at large. This change marked a limit to the congregation’s development within university governance: attendance had widened beyond the campus, but the request for an independent board was not accepted.

Upon retirement, Thurman received a $10,000 check to begin the Howard Thurman Foundation, which was intended to help African American students. His family settled back in San Francisco, where he did much of his writing. The foundation connected his later work to the university’s educational setting even after his chapel ministry there had ended. Howard University’s significance in this account lies in the experiments Thurman carried out there and in the questions they raised: how worship might meet students through varied forms, and how a shared spiritual experience might foster a sense of unity.