April 14, 2009 | A time before there was Duke Chapel? I couldn’t imagine it. And yet my elderly friend was telling me about walking through Duke Forest as his father contemplated where Duke Chapel ought to go. In the late 1920s, my friend’s father was the last president of Trinity College and the first president in 1924 of the newly re-named Duke University. At the time we spoke, I was new in my role as dean of Duke Divinity School, and I loved to hear his stories about the history of Duke University and of all of the presidents and deans he has known.

But Duke Chapel always had been here. Hadn’t it? It only had been here, as it turns out, since the early 1930s, when my friend and others watched its construction. People had to figure out the location as well as the design, not to mention several years of painstaking construction -- much of it the result of gifted Italian immigrant stonemasons. Because of a wide variety of people’s vision and care, we now have a space that looms across the Duke University landscape, a sanctuary for worship and music, a vibrant and visible symbol of Duke’s commitment to the importance of Christian ministry.

Modern Americans too often celebrate community without attending to the critically important roles that vibrant institutions play in enabling a community’s practices to flourish. Too often we take vibrant institutions for granted, forgetting they are crucial for creating spaces that shape and pattern human life and address fundamental human needs and yearnings. Because we have ignored the crucial difference that vibrant institutions make in our lives and in the ecology of our wider social existence, we too often have allowed vibrant institutions to become lifeless bureaucracies. We have watched once-glorious spaces deteriorate and become shells of the vitality they once represented. Christian life suffers as a result.

By contrast, vibrant spaces like Duke Chapel, and more broadly vibrant houses of worship and institutions of Christian higher education, continually make room for Christian wisdom to be nurtured over the course of time. We tend to underestimate how institutional spaces “speak” to people. Over the years, I have heard story after story about vocations discovered and renewed, relationships developed and reconciled, spiritual life developed and deepened -- all occasioned by particular Christian institutional spaces.

But not only the space. It is also the way of life those institutions nurture. At their best, institutions communicate and nurture vibrancy as bearers of tradition, laboratories for learning and incubators of leadership. Christian institutions give form and structure to our convictions, enabling us to cultivate thriving communities to be signs, foretastes and instruments of the reign of God. Seen in this light, faithful Christian living depends significantly on our ability not only to think about institutions but also to think appreciatively from within them -- to cultivate the practice of thinking institutionally.

Why? Vibrant Christian institutions are bearers of tradition. These traditions are found in the architecture, in the rhythms of daily schedules, in the formal and informal norms of the people who work and pray there, in the ways positions are described, in the ways decisions are made. This is most obviously evident in monastic communities that have lasted for decades and even centuries, but it is no less true of such institutions as seminaries, congregations, L’Arche communities or hospices.