Wait Chapel is a building on the campus of Wake Forest University. It houses the Janet Jeffrey Carlile Harris Carillon of 48 bells. The chapel seats 2,250 people. The steeple reaches to 213 feet. It also houses the Williams Organ, donated by Walter McAdoo Williams, namesake of Walter M. Williams High School.
The first building constructed on the Reynolda campus of Wake Forest University, it was named in memory of Samuel Wait, the university's first president, in October 1956.
On March 17, 1978, President Jimmy Carter made a major National Security address in Wait Chapel. In 1988, it hosted a presidential debate between George H. W. Bush and Michael Dukakis. On October 11, 2000, it hosted the presidential debate between candidates George W. Bush and Al Gore. On September 13, 2007 it hosted a broadcast of National Public Radio (NPR) show, Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. The show aired on September 15. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. spoke there in November 2011.
In the predawn hours of April 18, 1978, students affixed a large Mickey Mouse to the 10-foot-diameter (3.0 m) clock face of Wait Chapel facing the Quad. The Chapel is linked to a vast underground series of tunnels crisscrossing the campus carrying utilities.
The congregation of Wake Forest Baptist Church holds regular Sunday services in the chapel. In the late 1990s the chapel became the center of controversy when members of the church decided to conduct a same-sex commitment ceremony. Other events held in the chapel throughout the year, include a Moravian lovefeast during the Christmas season.
Famous quotes containing the words wait and/or chapel:
“There is a great stir about colored men getting their rights, but not a word about colored women, and if colored men get their rights, and not colored women theirs, you see the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before. So I’m for keeping the thing going while things are stirring; because if we wait till it is still, it will take a great while to get it going again.”
—Sojourner Truth (1797–1883)
“I never went near the Wellesley College chapel in my four years there, but I am still amazed at the amount of Christian charity that school stuck us all with, a kind of glazed politeness in the face of boredom and stupidity. Tolerance, in the worst sense of the word.... How marvelous it would have been to go to a women’s college that encouraged impoliteness, that rewarded aggression, that encouraged argument.”
—Nora Ephron (b. 1941)