Christa Swenson was working in New York City at a catalog company on Sept. 11, 2001, a day that changed the world. It changed hers, too.
“I had to ask myself: Why was I waiting? Why wait any longer to go to seminary?” she recalls. “Now it was urgent.”
Swenson soon went to seminary in New York, became a youth minister, and entered the adventure of helping young people find their voice in the story of faith.
She’s still on the case. Since 2008, she has been liturgical coordinator at Marquand Chapel, home to a steady weekday worship schedule of liturgical diversity and tradition, world music innovation, old hymns and new poetry. The space represents the School’s Christian values and commitment to community while giving students practice at organizing a service.
Swenson works to make sure it happens each day.
“We’re in a unique position at YDS,” says Swenson, who works under Maggi Dawn, the chapel dean and visionary. “Other schools have worship programs, but here worship is a central event. Students here are certainly formed by their scholarly pursuits, but community worship is also a formative component of their education. Other schools have come to visit our worship to see how we do it.”
Swenson manages a team of students who take on the daily responsibility of planning services. These chapel ministers structure liturgies, choose hymns, and enlist choirs, musicians, faculty, staff and other students. They get a grasp on the theologies at work in the selected biblical readings and orders of service.
In short, they learn liturgical leadership, immersing in professional details that worshipers in the pews seldom see or think about.
“Christa handles all the logistics—she’s really gifted at making chapel a well-oiled machine and teaching us and uplifting the community,” says Porsha Williams, an M.Div. student who graduates in May. She was a chapel minister last year.
“I came in not knowing much at all about planning worship or realizing the details or the hard work it takes. She helped me understand ecumenical worship and the liturgical seasons and the liturgical calendar—even down to the colors used. She challenged me to create a service from scratch. She said, ‘OK, Porsha, make it happen!’ And I was able to do it—twice!”
As Swenson puts it: “I help them find their voice.”
The chapel’s range of worship styles—drawing on Lutheran practices one day, or Nigerian liturgies or Pentecostal praise or Catholic foot-washing the next—is a core element of the YDS chapel experience. The 21st- century education of a minister-in-training must include familiarity and ease with an ever-expanding spiritual diversity, Swenson says. That’s the world now.
“Fewer and fewer congregations are comprised of people who bring memories of just one kind of worship experience,” Swenson says. “Churches are faced with addressing a wide range of theological perspectives among attendees. So here the students learn diverse vocabularies for communicating with people. They gain some confidence about encountering that diversity—access points for all sorts of worship styles.”
Swenson’s interest in the dynamics of worship and the vocations of young people goes back to her own churchgoing childhood. She grew up in Pittsburgh, was raised Presbyterian—and was ordained an elder in 10th grade.
“I was the kid who was always at church and loved being there,” she says. “That’s pretty young to be chosen an elder but it’s not unheard of.”
Presbyterian elders are chosen to serve a term on the congregation’s governing board, or session, after showing signs or promise of leadership. Swenson served on committees and led Youth Sunday services, among other duties.
By the time she was college age, other talents were bidding for her attention. She decided to pursue a business career, at least for a while. She attended Muskingum University, a Presbyterian school in New Concord, Ohio, receiving a B.A. in business and psychology.
“Ministry was always there on the periphery, something I thought I’d eventually do.”
That reckoning came on 9/11, and she soon was attending Union Theological Seminary in New York, with an internship at Broadway Presbyterian Church in Manhattan. After graduation, she joined the congregation’s staff as the campus and young adult minister, working there three years before coming to YDS.
Swenson’s task is to uphold a particular chapel spirit of generosity across the weeks and semesters in a time of great interplay—sometimes great tension— between church tradition and spiritual innovation. As the YDS website declares, “Marquand Chapel serves as a nexus of Christian spirit past, present, and future, giving students a glimpse of local liturgical possibility, a deeper sense of tradition, and an experience of world Christian solidarity.”
“A question we constantly ask is, ‘Whose voice is missing?’ ” she says. “And it leads us to invite individuals or groups that might have been overlooked. We’re here to remember our interconnection as human beings—we’re part of all that God created. This is why worshiping in community is so important. It’s a set-apart time, a time to set aside the quotidian, the day-to-day, and give yourself a reminder of the bigger world, and to be grateful for that connection.”