Mobile Chapel

A chapel is a building used by Christians, members of other religions, and sometimes interfaith communities, as a place of fellowship and worship. It may be attached to an institution such as a large church, college, hospital, palace, prison or funeral home, located on board a military or commercial ship, or it may be an entirely free-standing building, sometimes with its own grounds. Many military installations have chapels for the use of military personnel, normally under the leadership of a military chaplain. Until the Protestant Reformation, a chapel denoted a place of worship that was either at a secondary location that was not the main responsibility of the local parish priest, or that belonged to a person or institution. Most larger churches had one or more secondary altars, which if they occupied a distinct space, would often be called a chapel. The word chapel is in particularly common usage in England, and even more so in Wales, for independent or nonconformist places of worship; and in Scotland and Ireland many ordinary Roman Catholic churches as well as non-Anglican church buildings are known to locals as "the chapel". In England, due to the rise in popularity of independent or nonconformist chapels throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, by the time of the 1851 census, more people attended the independent chapels, albeit at their own expense, than attended the state's Anglican churches.