Carina Biar will never forget that January Sunday in 2023 in the Canterbury House at  Northwestern University. “We didn’t have heat or water or walls in the dining room because a pipe had burst over winter break,” says Biar, who was a senior at the time. “So we wore down coats and made luminaria and celebrated Epiphany in a place of community where people show up even when things inside and outside are pretty crazy.”

The feeling of belonging to a nurturing and close-knit community has sustained the small Canterbury ministry at Northwestern even as its numbers have dwindled to about half a dozen deeply committed regulars. “As a student, I always had a lot of competing priorities, but the place I knew I needed to be every Sunday night was the Canterbury House,” says Olivia Alexander, a graduating senior who is the group’s current president.  “I was drawn to this place by how kind and supportive people were. It has been the through line of my entire college experience.”

Students graduate and depart, however, and to ensure the Canterbury community’s future, the ministry must grow. Last fall, the Rev. Greg Millikin, recently-installed rector at nearby St. Mark’s, Evanston, began work as the group’s quarter-time chaplain, with an eye toward expanding its reach while preserving its character.

“I thought at first, I am a priest so let’s do Eucharist,” says Millikin, who was previously rector at Grace, New Lenox. “But the cornerstone of their ministry is meeting on Sundays for either evening prayer or compline, and then they cook a meal together.”

“It’s incredibly special to get to cook with other people,” Bair says. “You’re thinking, ‘I don’t know how to chop this avocado!’ It forces you to be vulnerable in a different way .”

When Millikin arrived, the group was doing mostly tacos and breakfast for dinner, but he had higher aspirations for them, and took them in “a Blue Apron direction.”

“One day we made Indian butter chicken,” he says. “We’ve made turkey chili, and a lot of things from scratch.” It is in preparing food that students loosen up and begin talking about their week.

“That feels like the most Jesus-centric thing of the entire ministry,” Millikin says. “He loved a good meal and loved the interaction with people of all walks of life at a meal. And then his last gift to us is a meal.”

Students also often participate in a book group, and several sing in local church choirs.

Campus ministry has been important in Millikin’s own life. A homesick freshman at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, he found his way to the Chapel of the Cross, the Episcopal Church near the university which had what he describes as a low-church ministry to about 30 students that “transformed my life and transformed my spiritual life and solidified the idea … that I was on a path to some kind of ministry.”

Alexander says Canterbury House occupies a special position among campus ministries at Northwestern. “I was raised Episcopalian, but you don’t have to be,” she says. “We have Lutherans and Catholics and the values the Episcopal church speak to them.” The university, she says, is a secular environment, and “to engage meaningfully with people who are religious in this affirming Christian space is awesome.” 

Biar, who graduated in 2023 and works in Chicago, undertakes a roundtrip commute for more than two hours, to continue her participation in the Canterbury ministry. “It’s definitely the community that keeps me coming back,” she says. “Everyone I’ve met a Canterbury is somehow the most thoughtful and funny and smart and generous person.”

She is grateful to the Rev. Jeannette DeFriest, Millikin’s volunteer predecessor, who served the community for several years before retiring, but is encouraged that Millikin is not a volunteer. “That has allowed us to feel we can rely on him,” she says. “Knowing he is around and has time to give to us makes it feel like we are building something rather than just preventing it from crumbling.”

Millikin says the importance of the work at Northwestern was brought home to him after Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7. “I was able to reach out and say, ‘I am here and available if you need to talk about this, and to provide them with some resources,” he says. “Two students came and met with me and cried and talked about their feelings, and to me it proved that this is something students are missing. And the two who came were not regulars.”

With Alexander and some of his other regulars preparing to leave the area, Millikin knows he must take “a big reboot” on the ministry when students return in the fall. “There are at least 50 students who have identified themselves as Episcopalians out there,” he says. “And my job in the next year is to reach out to them and make them feel welcome.”

“I am putting in all my chips on growing.”