There have been celebrations this month as Keele University Chapel reaches 60.
The distinctive building sits in the heart of the university campus, perched on the hills west of Newcastle-under Lyme and nestling in a curve of the M6 motorway. But as a haven of peace and worship the building has been loved by generations of students, as one of the current chaplains, Revd Stephanie Couvela explains:
"We had, the 50th anniversary just after I arrived as chaplain in 2015. We had a huge party for then. We kept this one a little bit more low key, but it's been lovely to celebrate an anniversary of this amazing building.
"We have two Sunday congregations. We have a service that we call 1015 because it's at 1015. And that is our ecumenical service. So technically we're a local ecumenical partnership between five denominations the Anglicans, the Baptists, the Methodists, the United Reformed Church and the Catholics. And then at 12:30, we have a Catholic mass with a visiting priest chaplain, and we have a lay Catholic chaplain, a Free Church chaplain who's a Methodist minister. And outside of the chapel community as well we have a wonderful Muslim chaplain right here.
"This building is it's just an amazing space. George Pace was the architect and he was very famous in the 1960s. So there's lots of features that are very characteristic of his architecture, like big gluelam beams and tall slit windows, all kind of offset. But as a space, it's tremendously flexible."
And the ecumencial chapel hosts many student groups throughout the terms for special events and regular worship for many denominations including Anglican, Roman Catholic, Free Church, Pentecostal, Quaker and Adventist as well as offering hospitality and space to students of other faiths and none.
"The chapel gets used by lots of different student groups at different times. Some of them have their regular meetings here. And some of them just use it for kind of special occasions. So you see, you have their big events here, but their regular meetings are elsewhere in a slightly smaller space. We have Catholic Society that meets here and a student chapel fellowship, which is a group that's affiliated with the Student Christian Movement. That's one of our smaller groups that meets in one of the offices here. And then there's a bigger group called Arise. That's a new thing in the last couple of years. They meet here on a Friday. The Christian Union have their mission week here, so it gets used for all kinds of different things by by different student groups at different times. We've got a new Orthodox Christian society this year. We've got an Adventist group. So there's lots of different branches of Christianity that people feel at home in. So student groups will contact us and say 'we're planning this event, can we come and use the building?' And most often we say, well, we're sorry we're busy with something else already, but whenever we possibly can, we say 'yes'. It's wonderful.
"I really love being a university chaplain, and I love being in chaplaincy. There's a verse in the Psalms where it talks about the Lord has led me out to a spacious place. And that's what chaplaincy has felt like to me, that I'm in this very spacious place of being able to be a person of faith in a secular institution and bring that voice and that uniqueness and that authenticity without feeling the need to be over-the-top about it, I suppose. As a chaplain, I get to be the guest rather than the host. So I get to come into other people's spaces, secular spaces, and bring the voice and the experience of faith into that context. And that's such a joy. Rather than being in a church and trying to get people to come to me, I get to be where people are and I get to spend so much of my time with young adults, with people of other faiths, with people of no faith. And that's such a privilege and a joy. "