by Demarion Johnson, Contributing Opinion
Asbury University’s chapel has met in Hughes Auditorium for almost 90 years. Over this past semester, and I am sure in previous years, conversations about chapel have been a major topic on campus. One of my favorite chapel conversations is whether or not chapel is church. Personally, I think that while it does have aspects that you will find in a church, chapel itself is not meant to be modeled after church.
“Chapel is also different because we do not always follow the historical Christian elements of a church service,” said Jeannie Banter, assistant director of spiritual life and assistant chaplain. “While many chapel services do include many of these elements, we are an academic institution integrating learning and faith, so not all of these elements are included in every chapel service.”
Before I decided that I was coming to Asbury, I would constantly hear, “Oh, do you want to go to church three times a week?” or “You know you have to go to church every day,” from people that I went to high school with who had little knowledge of Asbury. Frankly, those are misconceptions about what chapel is and how it functions. If you are in any way familiar with Asbury’s chapel services, you understand that chapel is known to have scripture-based preaching, panels of all sorts and speakers touching on many different topics.
The university’s website says: “One of the rich traditions of Asbury University is to provide an opportunity for our campus community to gather together to hear from God and to worship corporately. Therefore, we place a high priority on chapel as a mandatory opportunity for student spiritual formation. Each Monday, Wednesday and Friday morning of the semester at 10 a.m. in Hughes Auditorium, we sing, pray and hear the Word of God proclaimed.” When chapel is described in this way, I think we get tied up on the phrase “hear the Word of God proclaimed.” So for some of the student body, it feels like the only way we can proclaim the Word of God is solely through Bible-based messages.
“It seems like our culture has tempted us to find an easy box to check off for church,” said campus chaplain Greg Haseloff. “I’m thinking that something in our culture tempts us toward the most streamlined experience we can have for what we might describe as church.” I would have to agree with this because when something doesn’t fit into our box that describes church, we get into a frenzy — often forgetting that there are multiple ways to do things.
“If you went to a public school, you had assemblies,” said senior Josh Pelletier. “We expect [chapel] to be like church, … but I think the point of it is we’re living in a community having an assembly talking about issues that we are dealing with, and that can be from a spiritual aspect. I think we forget that chapel is supposed to be a time to be together and talk about things as a community and forget that it’s not supposed to look like a church.”
That is exactly what chapel is: a campus meeting talking about difficult conversations to grow as people. The Nov. 2 chapel featured speaker Rev. Katherine Callahan-Howell, and her message was less like church and more about digging into a hard, yet very important topic about racial reconciliation. In this chapel, she utilized data and research, which is not usually found in a church sermon, but this allowed campus to wrestle with facts that we normally would not deal with in church. That’s the beautiful thing about chapel — that we can hear about and discuss topics in ways that aren’t orthodox for a church service.
While we are at Asbury, we are supposed to be challenged every day, and we should be challenged as a campus every time we step foot into Hughes. As Christians, it is beyond important to have the conversations that we have in chapel. And don’t get me wrong, I also think it is important to have Bible-based messages.
“Chapel can be where the word is preached like church on Sunday,” said Vice President of Spiritual Life Kat Brown, “but it can also be a place to have political discussions and panels and things like the Sexuality Symposium.”
Chapel is a place that helps us fulfill the Asbury tagline: “Start here. Impact the World.” If we can’t learn from our brothers and sisters who have different opinions than we do, how can we impact a world that we don’t understand? Chapel is a place that is helping us understand a world that we are meant to impact.
