After George Fox University students deserted campus for summer vacation last May, art and design professor Tim Timmerman retreated to a large, windowless studio on the west side of the private Christian school in Newberg and began working on two murals, both inspired by Bible stories and imagery. 

I dropped in on him in July as the bold colors were starting to pop on six large wooden panels, each nearly as tall as the artist and about 5 feet wide, requiring an assistant to move them. “That painting,” he said, pointing at one, “took over 65 hours.”

After they were finished in mid-August, the panels were moved across campus to the home for which they were designed: a beautiful 7,500-square-foot, nearly 50-foot-tall chapel. Designed by Andrew Burke at Portland’s Soderstrom Architects, it stands on a gentle slope in the middle of campus along the wooded edge of Hess Creek. Like traditional chapels, it faces east, toward Jerusalem.

From 5 to 7 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 14, the university will host an open house to give the general public a chance to see the wondrous building and the art adorning it. Timmerman’s The Peaceable Kingdom Come murals share the cavernous space with stained glass windows designed by students and made by Bryant Stanton in Waco, Texas. Scheduled to arrive next year is a 12-foot Celtic cross hand-sculpted in sandstone by renowned Irish artist Brendan McGloin, to be placed in the garden.

“We believe the chapel inspires contemplation, evokes wonder, and fosters a deeper connection with the Lord,” said university President Robin Baker. “In a world driven by technology, we conceived a space to reconnect with something more profound than modern conveniences. It’s not a place of escape, but one of significant meaning and genuine connection.”

The chapel has been years in the making. Baker, a historian who has led students of Celtic spirituality on tours of Irish cathedrals, has long envisioned such a project for the campus, where services are currently held in a modern auditorium. He wanted an actual chapel, with no screens or PowerPoints.

“The Irish were, in particular, really committed to an understanding of meeting God in unique spaces,” he told me. “They called them ‘thin’ spaces, places where the eternal and the temporal meet.”

The 4,000-student university’s board signed off on a campus chapel about four years ago, and conceptions for the artwork took nearly as long. Timmerman’s students were invited to submit proposals for the stained-glass windows. When Stanton reviewed the finalists in his Waco studio, where he’s been working in stained glass since 1979, the artist felt the work exhibited “a lack of understanding of stained glass.”

“Their designs were better suited for mosaic tile work than stained glass,” he said. “So, I made the offer that Tim and his students visit my studio for a few days.”

In 2022, he gave the group a tour of several Texas churches where his work appears, then they spent a few more days in his studio, where he and his wife, Suzanne, employ more than a dozen artisans to help. He gave them “a crash course in stained glass.” 

Not all of what will eventually be two dozen stained-glass pieces are in yet. But on my most recent visit, scenes from Genesis, Exodus, and Jonah — which include Moses and the burning bush, and Jonah and the whale — were up in the north windows.

The six panels of The Peaceable Kingdom Come, meanwhile, fit together in seamless stacks of three to form two vertical halves — one on each side of the back wall over the doors. Each measures 5-by-17 feet, and the bottom edge is more than 10 feet above the floor.

The panels started small. Timmerman first did versions of the murals about a foot wide and 30 inches or so tall. Photographs taken of those were divided into thirds, then projected onto the larger wood panels, where he and a student assistant painted them over the summer.

The lines and colors in these towering murals are bold without being gaudy, offering the viewer a feast of Christian imagery.

The piece was inspired by the American folk painter and Quaker Edward Hicks, who created as many as 100 paintings of The Peaceable Kingdom, reflecting the artist’s belief that the lush countryside of Pennsylvania, where he was born in 1780, was the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy that there would be love and harmony between people and animals.

But while Hicks used Pennsylvania as his template, Timmerman’s work reflects both Oregon and the university founded by Quakers in 1891. Animals appearing in the Bible join those native to the Pacific Northwest, including the western meadowlark — Oregon’s state bird. The young people who sit peacefully alongside them are modeled on students and alumni.

In some instances, he relied on photographs; for others, theater students posed and Timmerman added individual faces. “I had a good time figuring out who’s who,” he said. “We did talk to students and ask if they’d be up for doing this, for being part of this. It was very much a team project.”

In planning the murals, Timmerman and Stanton ensured that their work would sync.

“I was trying to mimic his palette for the windows,” Timmerman said. “I wanted the Heavenly from the Trinity to kind of match what I was doing.”

Slightly more than the bottom half of each painting is lush with pastoral greens where the animals and people coexist in harmony, along with the blue of streams and the sky. But from above, Kingdom Come, inspired by Revelations, descends with imagery in yellows, orange, and purple. Winged animals, including an ox and a lion, represent the four gospels. There are also the seven lampstands, and a tree bearing 12 fruits. Angels resemble more past and present members of the George Fox community.

But the windows and murals aren’t the only aesthetic components of the space.

At the front, there’s a digital organ (the visible pipes are decorative only) manufactured by Rodgers Instruments in Hillsboro. In the rear are two extraordinary pieces of art: a bronze sculpture of the Last Supper by Scott Rogers, in which the 12 disciples and the tableware form an infinity symbol; and a rare hand-calligraphed Bible. It’s one of 299 editions of a 1,200-page original commissioned in 1995 by the Benedictines at Saint John’s Abbey in Minnesota — the first completed by hand in more than five centuries. George Fox is one of two academic institutions in Oregon that have acquired all seven volumes of this Bible.

The chapel notes are helpful here:

Envisioned by the leading calligrapher in the world since 1970, Donald Jackson — the official scribe of the King of England, living in Wales — the project was proposed to Saint John’s Abbey in 1995, celebrating its 150th anniversary. After several years of planning, the folios on parchment were produced between 2001 and 2011, and over the next two years, the 299 volumes of the Heritage Edition were completed by hand.

Finally, upon entering the chapel from the west through massive doors, one finds a Hobbit-ish door on the right that opens into a cozy library with a collection of faith-centered works donated by Baker. Many were written by C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, including some first editions and a 1950 printing of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe signed by the illustrator, Pauline Baynes.

Burke, principal architect at Soderstrom, was responsible for the structure that houses all this and nurtures a space for contemplation. Since 2004, the Portland firm has designed nine churches and spiritual buildings around Oregon. Burke, who came aboard in 2005, had a hand in only one he recalls: the bell tower at Mount Angel Abbey.

This was his first chapel, and he rightly regards it as a work of art in itself.

“I think everything is an artistic process,” he said. “I mean, making a decision about a piece of flashing on a roof; it either looks thoughtful or it doesn’t. That’s art, that’s ultimately an aesthetic judgment.”

In conversations with Baker, Burke said it was occasionally a struggle for him to imagine what was obviously clearer in the president’s “mind’s eye.” One early reference point was Thorncrown Chapel in Eureka Springs, Ark. Designed by E. Fay Jones, an apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright, it embodies that legendary architect’s Prairie School of design while also emulating Sainte-Chapelle, a light-filled Gothic church in Paris.

“He was interested in it being sort of Northwest modern, but he also loved traditional European churches,” Burke said. “So, there were a whole bunch of things that kind of got stirred together.”

The 275-seat chapel also gave Burke an opportunity for a personal first: using virtual-reality modeling.

“We really went through and tested option after option,” he said. “What happens if this fascia is 5 inches deeper? What happens if this material is painted rather than wood? So often in the early parts of my career, you built something and you’d walk into the building for the first time and there were surprises.” For the task of creating an environment that kept technology to a minimum, technology enabled the elimination of surprises.

The results have brought a lot of joy in the university community. Dahlia Citlalli Carrillo-Sanchez, a senior majoring in computer science, has been watching the chapel go up since she was a sophomore. As a worship leader for Wednesday night chapel, she said being in that contemplative space is “an extraordinary experience.” The murals, she added, particularly resonate with her.

“As a student of color, seeing alumni who shared similar experiences at George Fox is empowering,” she said. “It is profoundly meaningful to know that this chapel was created to embrace and honor all people, reflecting [the university’s] community and progress towards inclusivity and amplifying people of color.”

Timmerman, of course, was there for the installation. Mostly to “cheer them on,” as the panels went up, but he also had to go up on a ladder lift to do light touchup work where the panels connect. He recalls taking a seat at the front of the chapel and watching as the left mural finally clicked into place, and he started to cry.

“I’m just honored that President Baker would ask me to participate in this,” he said. “And I’m excited for the students in years to come to just take ownership of that space, which they are already. This is us, these paintings are us. The stained-glass window is us. This is who we are.”