Administrative Repositioning Elevates Center for Sacred Arts and Liturgical Renewal Across University

The Center for Sacred Arts and Liturgical Renewal will operate as a university-level body beginning with the autumn term, Abide University announced on August 6, 2026. The Center has until now been a program area within the School of Divinity. Under the new arrangement it reports to the Office of the Provost, holds its own budget line, and carries a mandate that extends beyond the classroom to chapel worship, the university libraries, and the wider community the university serves.

The change is administrative in form and pastoral in intent. Worship is not a subject the university teaches alongside others; it is the activity the university exists to serve, and the practice in which everything else it teaches is finally either confirmed or contradicted. Placing the Center at the level of the institution rather than inside one of its parts is an attempt to let the structure say what the university has always claimed to believe.

“A school that teaches the doctrine of God well and sings badly has not taught the doctrine of God well,” the Provost’s memorandum on the repositioning states. “The two are not separate accomplishments.”

What the Repositioning Actually Changes

Four things change with the autumn term.

The Center’s director now reports to the Provost rather than through the School of Divinity, which removes an intermediate approval layer for work that touches the whole institution rather than a single course of study.

The Center holds a standing budget line rather than drawing from a departmental allocation, which allows multi-year commitments — a hymnal collection, a translation project, a long-running commission — that a year-to-year allocation could not support.

The Center gains formal responsibility for chapel worship, jointly with the University Chaplain, and a consultative role in decisions about the acoustic, visual, and spatial character of university spaces used for prayer and gathering.

And the Center may now hold appointments and commissions directly, so that a composer, translator, or artist may be attached to the Center without first being fitted into an existing teaching line.

Nothing in the repositioning alters what any student studies or what any course requires. The change is one of standing and reach.

Why the Work Outgrew a Single Program Area

The Center began, as such things usually do, with a narrow brief: to look after the music of the chapel and to teach a small number of courses on worship.

The brief did not stay narrow, because the questions did not. A question about which songs a congregation sings becomes a question about who wrote them and what they teach. A question about a hymn’s translation becomes a question about the theology of the receiving language. A question about a chapel’s layout becomes a question about where the pulpit stands relative to the table, and what a congregation learns week after week from an arrangement nobody has explained to them.

Faculty found themselves consulted on matters that had no home. Pastors wrote asking whether a rented room could be arranged for the Lord’s Supper without embarrassment. Translators wrote asking how to render a metrical psalm in a tone language where a melody can change a word’s meaning. Musicians in congregations with no trained leader wrote asking, in effect, how to begin.

These are not incidental questions. They are the daily practical theology of the church at worship, and no existing unit was structured to answer them. The repositioning creates one.

What the Center Means by Sacred Arts

The Center uses the term broadly and defines it carefully, because vagueness here produces work that is merely decorative.

Sacred arts, in the Center’s usage, are the made things through which a congregation worships: the songs it sings and the settings it sings them to; the room it gathers in and the way that room is arranged; the objects it uses, from the table and the cup to the cloth and the book; the images it does or does not display; the words of its prayers considered as composed language rather than as improvisation; and the craft — the joinery, weaving, printing, metalwork, and needlework — by which those things are made well or badly.

Two convictions govern the definition. The first is that these things teach. A congregation learns from the shape of its service, the placement of its furniture, and the theology of its songs more consistently than it learns from any single sermon, because it meets them every week for a lifetime. The second is that the making is itself a form of obedience. The instructions for the tabernacle in Exodus are unusually detailed about craft, and they name the artisans and say the Spirit of God filled them with skill. The tradition has not always known what to do with that passage. The Center takes it as a mandate.

What the Center Means by Liturgical Renewal

“Renewal” is used in its older sense: not innovation, and not restoration for its own sake, but the recovery of a working shape that has been mislaid.

Most Christian traditions inherit a service with a discernible structure. The congregation is called to worship by God rather than by a host. It confesses sin and hears assurance of pardon. Scripture is read at length and then preached. The people pray for the church and the world. The Lord’s Supper is celebrated, at whatever frequency the tradition holds. The congregation is sent out under a blessing pronounced rather than wished.

That shape is not arbitrary. It rehearses the gospel: God speaks first, we answer, we are found wanting, we are forgiven, we are fed, we are sent. Where the shape erodes — where confession disappears, or the reading shrinks to a verse, or the blessing becomes a farewell — the congregation is still taught something every week. It is simply taught something else.

The Center’s renewal work is therefore diagnostic before it is prescriptive. It asks what a given service actually teaches by its order, and leaves to the congregation and its own church the question of what to do about the answer.

The Congregational Song Collection

The Center’s largest ongoing undertaking is a working collection of congregational song, assembled with the libraries and open to any reader.

The collection gathers texts and tunes across traditions and languages, with attention to material that is well used and poorly documented. Much of the church’s song exists in oral circulation, in photocopied sheets, and in local hymnals printed in small runs and never catalogued anywhere. That material is at real risk; a congregation that loses its songbook loses a century of memory.

Each entry records what can be established about the text, the tune, the translator where there is one, the tradition of use, and the current standing of the material — whether it is in general circulation, held by a publisher, or of uncertain origin. Where authorship cannot be determined, the collection says so rather than guessing.

The Center considers honest attribution a matter of the Eighth Commandment rather than of administration, and the collection is built to make honest attribution easy for a worship leader in a hurry.

Psalmody and the Sung Scripture

A distinct program addresses the singing of the Psalms, which the Center regards as an unfinished inheritance rather than a historical curiosity.

The Reformation churches sang the Psalter in metrical versions, and a great deal of labor went into making Hebrew poetry singable in vernacular meter without distorting it. Some of that labor produced enduring work; some produced verse that scans only with effort. Both outcomes are instructive, and the Center studies them together.

The program examines the Genevan and Scottish traditions, later English metrical work, and the substantial body of psalm singing in African, Asian, and Latin American churches that developed along entirely different musical lines. It attends particularly to the imprecatory psalms and the psalms of lament, which many contemporary congregations have quietly stopped singing, and asks what a congregation loses when the only songs available to it are cheerful.

The program does not argue that congregations must sing only psalms. It argues that a church which never sings them has surrendered a form of prayer God gave it.

Worship Space and the Ordinary Room

Most Christian worship does not take place in a building designed for it. It takes place in rented halls, school classrooms, houses, storefronts, courtyards, and under trees.

The Center’s work on space therefore begins with the ordinary room rather than the purpose-built sanctuary. It examines what can be done well in a space the congregation does not control and must set up and clear away weekly: where to put the table so it is not mistaken for furniture, how to make a reading desk that does not look provisional, how to seat a congregation so that it faces itself rather than a stage, how to handle acoustics in a room with a low ceiling and a hard floor.

The program also studies purpose-built space, including the theological arguments encoded in historical arrangements — the relative prominence of pulpit, table, and font, the presence or absence of a division between the congregation and the ministers, the direction the congregation faces and what stands at the focal point.

The consistent finding, the Center reports, is that congregations read these arrangements accurately even when no one has ever explained them, and that a room can quietly teach a doctrine of the church that the pulpit is working to correct.

Visual Theology and the Question of Images

The Center works on visual art in worship, and does so knowing that Christians have divided sharply and sometimes violently over it.

The program describes the positions rather than adjudicating among them. It sets out the iconoclastic controversies of the Byzantine church and the settlement that followed; the Reformed churches’ reading of the second commandment and their removal of images from worship space, together with the reasoning offered for it; the Lutheran and Anglican retention of visual material under different arguments; and the Eastern traditions’ theology of the icon as something other than decoration or instruction.

It also examines what fills a space when images are removed, since no room is visually neutral. Whitewashed walls, inscribed texts, the grain of wood, the fall of light through clear glass, and the visible congregation itself all carry visual weight, and the traditions that rejected images generally knew this and made deliberate choices about it.

The Center holds that a school serving churches of several traditions owes each of them an accurate account of the others, and that flattening these differences into a general endorsement of beauty serves nobody.

Liturgical Translation and Multilingual Worship

The translation program addresses a set of problems that arise when a service crosses languages, and which are not the same problems as Scripture translation.

Sung text must be singable. A translation that is accurate on the page and unsingable in the mouth has failed at its actual task. Meter, stress, and vowel placement constrain the translator in ways prose does not. In tone languages the difficulty compounds sharply, since a melodic line can override lexical tone and turn a line of praise into something unintended or absurd.

Some words are conventionally retained untranslated — Amen, Hallelujah, Hosanna — and the program studies what that retention accomplishes and where it becomes an obstacle for a congregation that has never been told what the words mean.

A further strand addresses congregations that worship in more than one language at once, an increasingly common situation in cities. The program collects practical arrangements: sequential and simultaneous rendering, bilingual song texts, the deliberate use of the minority language at the most important moments rather than the least, and the pastoral question of who is expected to accommodate whom.

Forming Musicians Who Were Never Trained

Most congregational music is led by people with no formal training who volunteered because no one else would.

A dedicated program serves them, on the Center’s judgment that this is the highest-leverage work it does. The material is built for people with limited time, limited equipment, and often no ability to read notation: how to choose songs that a congregation can actually sing rather than listen to; how to pitch a melody within an ordinary vocal range; how to lead without amplification; how to accompany simply and stop when accompaniment is not helping; how to read a text theologically before agreeing to sing it.

The Center is explicit that this is formation rather than a favor. A worship leader makes weekly theological decisions about what a congregation will have in its memory decades from now, and does so with less support than any other person in the service.

The Chapel as the Center’s First Responsibility

Under the new arrangement the Center shares responsibility for chapel worship with the University Chaplain.

The intention is that the chapel function as the Center’s working demonstration rather than its showcase. What the Center teaches about the shape of the service, about song, about space, and about accessibility is to be visible in the chapel, including where it proves difficult. The Center has committed to publishing an annual account of chapel practice that records what was attempted and what did not work.

The chapel’s worship remains ordered by the university’s confessional commitments and is not a laboratory in which the community is experimented upon. Changes of any substance are announced beforehand with the reasoning given, on the principle that a congregation is owed an explanation before it is asked to worship differently.

Working With the Libraries

The Center works closely with the university libraries, which hold the hymnals, psalters, service books, and musical settings on which much of its work depends.

Two joint priorities have been set. The first is the preservation of fragile congregational material — locally printed hymnals, handwritten song collections, service orders — which exists in small numbers and is rarely held anywhere else. The second is description: material of this kind is often catalogued thinly or not at all, and an uncatalogued collection is functionally invisible to the researcher or pastor who needs it.

Digitized material is made openly available wherever the Center is confident it may lawfully do so. Where rights are unclear, the Center describes the item fully and makes it available on site rather than publishing it, and says plainly which case applies.

Ecumenical Range and Confessional Honesty

The Center serves a university with definite confessional commitments while working on material belonging to traditions that differ from it and from one another.

Its working rule is to describe each tradition in terms its own adherents would recognize, and to state the university’s position when the university has one rather than presenting it as a neutral conclusion. Where traditions disagree — on images, on the frequency and meaning of the Supper, on instruments, on the church year, on who may lead — the Center sets out the disagreement and the reasoning on each side.

This is not indifference. A congregation is better served by understanding why other Christians do what they do than by a survey that treats every practice as equally available and equally weightless.

Lament, and the Songs a Congregation Does Not Have

A strand of the Center’s work concerns absence: the parts of Christian experience for which a congregation has no song.

Lament is the clearest case. A substantial proportion of the Psalter is lament, and the biblical writers address God in grief, protest, confusion, and complaint without apology. Much contemporary congregational song has no vocabulary for any of this. A congregation that has buried a child, lost a harvest, or watched a member taken away has, in many cases, nothing to sing that acknowledges what has happened.

The Center regards this as a formation problem rather than a matter of taste. A congregation learns from its repertoire what may be brought to God. If everything it sings is confident, it will conclude that grief belongs outside the assembly, and its members will grieve alone.

The program works in three directions. It recovers existing lament from the tradition, including psalm settings and hymnody that has fallen out of use. It documents lament traditions in churches that have never lost them, several of which have far richer resources here than the churches that have. And it commissions new work, with a standing brief for texts addressing bereavement, displacement, prolonged illness, and unanswered prayer.

The Center notes that this is among the requests it receives most often from pastors, and among the requests it has been least able to answer.

Prayer, Composed and Extempore

A program of the Center treats public prayer as composed language, which is a claim some traditions accept immediately and others resist.

The resistance is intelligible. Written prayer can become recitation without attention, and traditions that recovered free prayer did so against a real abuse. But the alternative has its own failure. A minister praying extempore before a congregation every week, without preparation, will fall into a narrow set of phrases within a year, and the congregation will pray those phrases for a decade without anyone deciding that it should.

The Center’s position is that public prayer is a form of pastoral speech and deserves the same preparation a sermon receives, whether or not it is finally written out. The program studies the great prayers of the tradition — collects, litanies, the prayers of the church in historic service books — not as texts to be imposed but as instruction in what public prayer can include: adoration before petition, confession that is specific enough to be true, intercession that reaches beyond the congregation’s own membership, and thanksgiving that is not merely a preamble.

Particular attention goes to the prayers of the people, which the Center regards as the most neglected element in contemporary services. A congregation that never prays aloud for the sick, the imprisoned, the governing authorities, the persecuted church, and the community outside its doors has been quietly taught that the church prays for itself.

The Church Year and the Shape of Christian Time

The Center works on the calendar, and does so knowing that Christians differ over how much of it to keep.

Some traditions observe a full liturgical year. Some observe only the evangelical feasts of the Lord — the Nativity, the Passion and Resurrection, the Ascension, Pentecost. Some, on principle, observe none, holding that the Lord’s Day is the only day Scripture appoints and that adding to it burdens consciences.

The Center describes each position and the reasoning behind it. What it observes across all of them is that every congregation keeps some calendar. A church that formally observes nothing will still preach on the Resurrection in the spring, still mark the year with a cycle of emphases, still have seasons the congregation recognizes. The question is never whether time will be shaped, only whether the shaping is deliberate.

The program examines what different arrangements teach. A year built around the life of Christ rehearses the gospel narrative annually. A year built around the congregation’s own calendar of programs and campaigns rehearses something else. The Center puts the comparison plainly and leaves the decision where it belongs.

The Table, the Font, and the Book

A further program concerns the objects at the center of Christian worship and the craft that produces them.

The Center’s interest is practical. A table that is too small, too low, or indistinguishable from ordinary furniture teaches something about the Supper. A font that is a bowl borrowed from a kitchen teaches something about baptism. A pulpit Bible that is a paperback the minister carries in and out teaches something about the Word. None of these arrangements is sinful, and many congregations have no choice. But congregations that do have a choice frequently make it without noticing that they are making one.

The program collects designs that can be built locally with available materials and modest skill, on the principle that a congregation should not have to import its furniture to have furniture worthy of its use. It works with joiners, weavers, potters, and metalworkers in the traditions the university serves, and it prefers local craft to catalogue purchase wherever the two are comparable.

It also studies the textiles, vessels, and books that congregations have made for themselves over centuries, much of which is undocumented and some of which is very fine. The Center regards this as part of the church’s art history, not a footnote to it.

Accessibility as a Matter of Welcome

The Center treats accessibility in worship as a theological question before it is a technical one.

The congregation is described in Scripture as a body in which the parts that seem weaker are indispensable, and a service that a member cannot follow has, in practice, excluded that member from the assembly while leaving them in the room. The Center’s work here is concrete: audible speech and the equipment that supports it, sightlines that do not depend on standing, printed material in a size that can actually be read, plain language in the parts of the service where comprehension matters most, and provision for members whose participation is disrupted by noise or duration.

The program pays particular attention to the deaf and hard of hearing, for whom a service built almost entirely around speech and song presents obstacles that amplification alone does not solve, and to congregations that include members with cognitive disabilities, whose participation in the Supper and in the congregation’s common life raises questions that are pastoral rather than logistical.

The Center’s working principle is that provision made for a few generally improves the service for everyone, and that a congregation which finds accessibility inconvenient should ask what its inconvenience is costing.

What the Repositioning Does Not Do

The Center does not set worship policy for any congregation. It has no authority over churches, and it will not issue rulings on disputed questions of worship practice. Where a church has settled a matter by its own confessional standards and government, that settlement stands and the Center’s role is to serve it.

The repositioning creates no new course of study and changes no existing one. It alters where the Center sits in the university’s structure and what it may undertake.

Nor does it make the Center an arbiter of artistic quality. It will commission, collect, describe, and teach; it will not certify that a piece of music or a work of art is fit for worship, which is a judgment belonging to the congregation that would use it.

Accountability and Review

The Center reports annually to the Provost and publishes that report openly. The report records what was undertaken, what was completed, what was abandoned and why, and what the Center now believes it got wrong.

Commissions and appointments are named, with the terms of engagement described. Materials the Center publishes carry a correction note, and corrections are appended visibly rather than made silently.

A full review of the Center’s mandate is scheduled after three years. The university has stated that the review may conclude that the repositioning was unnecessary, and that this outcome would be reported as plainly as any other.

Effective Dates and Access

The new reporting line and budget arrangement take effect with the autumn term. The Congregational Song Collection and the psalmody program are already active and open to readers through the libraries. The programs on prayer, lament, and worship space continue under the Center’s existing staff. The translation and visual theology programs begin work in the winter term, and the program on furniture and craft opens the following spring.

Correspondence is welcome from pastors, worship leaders, translators, musicians, and artists, particularly from congregations holding song or service material that exists nowhere else. The Center has asked specifically to hear from those congregations, on the view that a tradition is preserved by the people who use it rather than by the institutions that study it.

The Provost’s memorandum closes with a sentence the Center has adopted as its working standard: the question is not whether the university’s worship is impressive, but whether a congregation of ordinary means, meeting in a borrowed room, could take up anything the Center produces and use it on Sunday. Where the answer is no, the work is not yet finished.