Chaplains in Higher Education establishments in the London Diocese serve over 250,000 students and 75,000 members of staff from ten universities and six art, drama and music colleges. Nearly 40 chaplains and chaplaincy personnel work across the Diocese from Brunel University in Uxbridge in the west, to Queen Mary College on the Mile End Road in the east.
Chaplains offer pastoral counselling and support and guidance in matters of faith and spiritual development for students and staff from the Christian tradition and also those with no religious background.
Chaplains also help develop a sense of belonging and community, a service that is especially valued by students challenged by the anonymity and scale of life in London.
Chaplaincies organise a range of different activities including regular church services, open meetings, lectures, workshops, weekends away, seminars and discussion groups as well as the co-ordination of occasions when the community wishes to mark a special event such as Remembrance Day, Christmas carol services or memorial services to honour University members who have died.
If every building tells a story, then every ‘landmark’ building tells a better one. Certainly, listening to Daniel Libeskind, you have to concede that this particular ‘landmark’ architect tells a very good story indeed. At the ceremony to open the new Graduate Centre of London Metropolitan University, Mr Libeskind, its architect, revealed that he had perplexed many of his colleagues. Why, they wondered, was the man designing the most prestigious building in the world, the replacement for the World Trade Centre in New York, bothering with a two storey building occupying no more than a few shop front lengths on the Holloway Road? Wherever, that was!
Daniel Libeskind was happy to enlighten them. When he first read the ‘Mission Statement’ of London Metropolitan University he learnt that the majority of its students were the first members of their families to enter Higher Education, and that more than 50% of the students came from ethnic minority backgrounds. It was then he realised that they could have been talking about him! It was then that he accepted the commission.
So London Metropolitan University is the proud custodian of London’s only Libeskind building. The Holloway Road is now on the architectural tourist trail, and the traffic flow is the slower because of it. The building both catches the eye and sparks the imagination. It asks questions. How does it defy gravity? What is it for? What does it mean? The London Metropolitan University’s graduate brochure explains. ‘As London’s largest single university, and the second largest in the country, our strategic mission is to serve the capital by providing excellent and accessible education and training and by meeting the needs of its communities, professions, industries and trades. The new Graduate Centre is just one example of the University’s commitment to investing in facilities which enhance the learning experience. Located on the Holloway Road the Graduate Centre will act as an outstanding visual landmark at the University’s London North Campus’. That summarises the aspirational story behind an inspirational building.
Yet another new ‘award winning’ university building tells one more heartening story: this time of a hidden treasure in Bloomsbury. The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, in contrast to London Metropolitan University’s 39,000, has less than 900 post graduate and research students, making it one of the smallest institutions of Higher Education in the capital. It stands in the shadow of Senate House, the University of London’s truly ‘landmark’ iconic headquarters building, and the capital’s first ever ‘skyscraper’.
However, the limitations of a 1930’s listed building also cast a shadow over the London School of Hygiene’s plans to help meet the health needs of the 21st century’s escalating world population.
The possibilities for the School’s expansion were constrained not just by limited finance but by issues of conservation within one of the city’s most attractive and historic districts. Somehow Devereux Architects came up with an ingenious plan to ‘in fill’ the dingy north court yard concealed behind the Portland stone façade of the main building in Keppel Street.
The result was an extraordinary achievement. The new building offers clever allusions to the School’s maritime origins in the Seamen’s Hospital at the Albert Dock. From within the glazed atrium you look up the five storeys of what seems to be an ocean going vessel, while the courtyard’s full grown palm trees suggest it is moored along side some tropical quay. The building specifically houses departments researching amongst other things, immunology, the prevention of bacterial disease, and the evaluation of nutrition and public health interventions. Again the new building was felt to epitomise the mission and philosophy of the School; a theme which was further highlighted by the invitation of Archbishop Desmond Tutu to open it. The Archbishop spoke movingly about the particular public health needs of Sub Saharan Africa and with gratitude for the humanitarian contribution the School continues to make there.
The reader might be forgiven for thinking that so far they were perusing an article for an architectural review. Not so. These two examples illustrate just some of the varied contexts in which Chaplaincy can work.
London Metropolitan University Chaplaincy is an example of a financial partnership with the Diocese of London. Through matched funding from the University and with added financial support from the Sir John Cass Educational Foundation, we are able to deploy two full time Anglican Chaplains; one based at each of the North London and City Campus sites. The Chaplains are fully integrated into the management and support structures of the University, and viewed as valued colleagues. As ‘Our Chaplains’ they are offered crucial advantages to exercise an influential ministry to staff and students teaching and learning the wide range of subjects taught across this large multi site University.
The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine with its smaller scale and public health focus offers different possibilities for Chaplaincy. For five years the Senior Anglican Chaplain has been the External Member on the School’s Ethics Committees. These bodies are required to approve all research undertaken on human or animal subjects. This is a significant responsibility as the School currently undertakes research projects in over 100 countries! Life saving work is being done to overcome diseases such as Malaria and HIV Aids in some of the poorest countries in the world as well as the re-emergence of TB in our own! The literally ‘global’ influence for good of this single, relatively small institution cannot be valued highly enough.
We are privileged to have so many influential Universities, Colleges and Higher Education Institutions in the Diocese of London. Each is in its own way is an engine for positive social change and human advancement; outcomes which the Christian would recognise as embodying ‘kingdom values’. They offer concrete evidence that God is blessing His gifts to us of reason and the spirit of service: a spirit of endeavour and service which our team of Chaplains are increasingly well placed to help stimulate and nurture.
This last year has seen two more Colleges enter into financial partnership with the Diocese. Both the Royal College of Art and Chelsea College of Art have recognised the benefit of having their own dedicated Chaplain and ‘buy in’ provision from the Diocese. The costs are met by the Colleges and the revenue generated offsets clergy costs. Again this develops a shared vision of the role of the Chaplain who is increasingly ‘owned’ by the institution as ‘theirs’. Again this fosters a deepening relationship with Staff and Students and provides a higher point of entry into the life of the College for the Chaplain. We now have fourteen partnership funding arrangements with Higher Education Institutions in the Diocese. There are a further four in the process of negotiation.
There is a growing climate of opinion in the educational world which recognises the importance of faith in many peoples’ lives. Perhaps only a generation ago the secular temperature was decidedly different; cool if not sceptical. The University of London Union shares this sea change of opinion. The large but now dated ULU Building which dominates the northern end of Malet Street is to undergo an extensive ‘remodelling’. For decades it has been something of a lottery as to the reception Chaplains might receive in this bastion of student politics; but not so now. Indeed the Chaplaincy has been approached with an invitation to move in! After a short period of consultation with ecumenical colleagues we have put in a bid for dedicated space. The rooms will provide a large flexible space for general use and the display of faith magazines, journals and information; a further room for confidential use such as spiritual direction and counselling will be set aside, along with an office for members of the Chaplaincy team to keep staffed on a rota basis.
Representatives of others prominent faith communities, as well as the Jewish Student Chaplain, are keen to share both the costs and the possibilities of this new facility. It will be strategically placed within a redevelopment that will attract tens of thousands of students through its doors each week. The new venture will reflect both the ecumenical nature of university Chaplaincy and the multicultural society from which students are drawn. It will be described as ‘the Chaplaincy and World Faith Centre’. In this way we intend to maintain the historical and distinctive Christian aspect of Chaplaincy while respecting and recognising the plural faith culture of contemporary university life.
Another recent development has involved those clergy who are tasked with reaching out to some of the capital’s many ethnic groups. For example, the Anglican Chaplain to the London School of Economics recognised that some countries had large and identifiable numbers of students studying at LSE. He has invited the Nigerian, Korean, Norwegian and Lutheran Student Chaplains to use the LSE Chaplaincy as a base for occasional social, cultural and religious events. This has many benefits. Firstly it develops a ‘cluster’ or embryonic team of Chaplains where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
Secondly it gives an entry point into the official university network for clergy who have to try to reach out to an ethnic constituency which can be dispersed across the region within the M25. Finally it helps foster a collective and supportive spirit among international students for whom studying in London poses particular challenges.
So far this report has focused on broad definable trends viewed through the lens of specific examples. I want now to describe a few of the many encouraging experiences highlighted by individual Chaplains in their annual reports.
The Anglican Chaplain to LSE recalls, ‘The most moving and curious event in the year was when a Muslim student came to see me and wanted to talk about T.S.Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral. So we spent a term reading it together and discussing the nature of God, of martyrdom and violence. It was quite extraordinary’.
The Anglican Chaplain to the Royal Veterinary College was a prime mover (following requests for information from various students and staff members) in promoting the need for a prayer/meditation room. Through working with the Students’ Union, a space was identified at the Hawkshead campus and work to decorate and furnish the room was undertaken during the summer. Such was the student commitment to the idea that the room allocation came from the SU’s own space.
At London’s newest University, the University of the Arts, the Anglican Chaplain continues to develop his role. ‘I continue to work closely with the Student Services staff, the counsellors and with the newly appointed Student Nurse and Mental Health Nurse. In conjunction with the Student Nurse I’ve reviewed the University’s ‘Sudden Death’ Policy and the role of the Chaplain’.
In West London the Ecumenical Chaplaincy Team to Imperial College, The Royal College of Art and the Royal College of Music is committed to exploring the possibilities of liturgy at the heart of their ministry. ‘We have continued the pattern of holding 2-3 joint Liturgy of the Word Services each term with the Catholic Society followed by or own Eucharistic Prayers. These took place at the start of the Academic year, Advent, Christian Unity Week, Ash Wednesday in Lent, and for the Feasts of the Ascension and Corpus Christi. A Non-Traditional Liturgy offered opportunity for personal reflection and prayer on World Aids Day using Power Point and music in Holy Trinity Church. It worked well and attracted a succession of people attending’.
In East London, special liturgies and regular social events also mark the yearly Chaplaincy calendar at Queen Mary, University of London. All through Lent ‘a simple labyrinth was taped onto the floor of the distinctive circular Chapel, based on the Psalms of Ascent, with stations related to discipleship. Then, later, ‘24/7’ prayer in the Chapel (with multi-sensory labyrinth) all through Pentecost, in preparation for Soul in the City, and in partnership with other East London Churches, especially the Salvation Army plant on the neighbouring Ocean Estate. While a ‘World Lunch’ took place every Tuesday in the first and second term with an average attendance of 80 students, both undergraduates and postgraduates, with very many from China. This incorporated seasonal short talks on Christmas and Easter. The menu consisted of pizza, pasta and rice, funded for three years in 2003 by a £3,000 grant from Tower Hamlets Deanery Synod. These projects were also supported by lots of practical help from the East London Tabernacle and Friends International. All donations from students go to Christian Aid’.
Meanwhile, in Central London, at the University of Westminster, interest in a ‘Spirituality Course’ (given by the Anglican Chaplain as part of the third year course in complimentary health at Greenwich University) has resulted in plans for his course to be given in the School of Complimentary Health in voluntary sessions next year. There is also interest to develop a course within the School as a module and a generic course for the University’.
As has already been made clear, cultural diversity is a particular hall mark of London Metropolitan University. This is reflected in the Chaplaincy too. At the Licensing Service for the new Anglican Chaplain, led by the Bishop of Stepney, the University’s Imam took a role and read from the Holy Quran. As colleagues the Chaplain and the Imam have sought to help students. In some cases securing funding from local business for students in severe financial difficulties; and helping two students move from inadequate and unsafe accommodation into halls of residence’.
As was noted in last year’s Annual Report, the Courtauld Institute of Art had recently joined both the ranks of the Colleges of the University of London and those HE institutions that have made a commitment to funding Chaplaincy provision. It was therefore more than encouraging to read regular emails from their new part-time Chaplain as he began to develop his ministry during the year. At the end of the summer term he wrote, ‘I have been asked, without even having touted my custom, to lead a graduate seminar on voice projection and public speaking at the Courtauld. It is part of a seminar for PhD students who teach the undergraduates. It is an excellent opportunity’, and by the start of the autumn term he could add, ‘All is well and beginning to blossom. I may have two candidates for confirmation from the first year, and there may be more candidates anon as there has been sign of more general interest’.
All of these ‘snap shots’ from various Chaplains’ reports illustrate the many priestly, pastoral and prophetic aspects of Chaplaincy in our capital’s institutions of Higher Education. By enhancing and deepening our Chaplaincy provision we are increasingly open to the possibilities of providence and every day we see the evidence of God blessing our work.
The Reverend Stephen Williams
Senior Anglican Higher Education Chaplain in the Diocese of London
Autumn 2004
