The bedroom does not seem out of the ordinary ““ textbooks are scattered on the desks, beds are unmade, and an open bag of chips sits on a shelf.
Yet, as light streams through the floor-length stained-glass windows and the sound of an organ filters through the room, it suddenly becomes hard to forget the bedroom’s location.
For nine UCLA students, the University Lutheran Chapel, tucked among fraternity houses and college apartments on Strathmore Drive, is home.
Each week, students living in the asymmetrical chapel put in 10 hours of work as part of their jobs as sextons, or people who take care of a church. In exchange for their work, which ranges from painting and renovating the church to helping out with chapel ministry and publicity, students get an inexpensive monthly rate, free parking and an apartment located minutes from campus.
Four bedrooms, three bathrooms, an airy kitchen and a communal living room ““ complete with a television, piano and pool table ““ are shared among the nine student sextons.
“It’s like living in a collective. We share a bathroom and kitchen, and we are working together to keep the aesthetic of the church,” said Dilan Swift, a fourth-year history student who lived at the chapel last quarter.
“It’s like living on your dorm floor, but even more so, because you are cooking together and events are organized together.”
News of the program, which began the same year the chapel was founded, is primarily passed down by word of mouth, said Mina Gendy, who has lived at the chapel for two and a half years. As a graduate student, Gendy is a rarity in a program dominated by UCLA undergraduates.
While all students must apply to the program, their reasons for doing so differ.
Roommates Lauren Cerulle, a third-year biochemistry student, and Katie Ryan, a fifth-year history student, said that cheap rent attracted them to the sexton program. But Gendy said he was motivated by the prospect of living in a Christian environment.
“It’s a community, but they don’t discriminate based on religion,” Swift said. “It is neat to gather and see the dynamic.”
Such a dynamic is fostered through the experience of relative strangers coming together to live in the chapel as roommates. Through joint work projects, meetings and the occasional shared meal, the sextons all attest to the community and friendships that are formed in the program.
Although the chapel is in no way the typical college apartment, none of the sextons seem to mind.
Gathered in the family room, Cerulle and Ryan laughed as they told stories of unusual occurrences that came from living at the chapel, including once finding a group of five people camping outside of their bedroom door.
“And the occasional vagabond,” Gendy added.
The students said it is those experiences and the sense of community that make them feel lucky to live at the chapel. This is also what compels sextons who worked at the chapel 20 years ago to still come back to visit, they said.
“When you hear the organ on Sunday, you think it’s just a church, but there is a lot more going on here,” Gendy said.