I have been going to chapel my whole life. I went to the same Christian school from pre-school to 12th grade, and then I went to a Christian college. I admit, it was a bit annoying to have chapel after chapel, but I have really learned a lot from all those chapels.
I have been going to chapel my whole life. I went to the same Christian school from pre-school to 12th grade, and then I went to a Christian college. I admit, it was a bit annoying to have chapel after chapel, but I have really learned a lot from all those chapels.
(Here is some quick math...I went to about 430 chapels before I went to college, and then to about 600 chapels in college. Yikes. [That's assuming I went to one chapel a week before college, with 36 weeks in the school year. And assuming I went to each chapel in college, one a day each day of the semester...assuming there are 75 days in the semester. Whew. AND I always had extra skips each semester...except one, when I miscounted and skipped one extra chapel than I thought I did, and consequently was on chapel probation the next semester. I thought it was absurd, because each semester before that I had at least 5 extra skips that I didn't use. WHY couldn't they just take a previously unused chapel skip and apply that the the EVIL semster? I don't get it.] That's over 1000 chapels. Not including the ones I have attended as a faculty member.)
After that long tangent, now I am a teacher ("On the dark side" as one of my students said last year) and chapel is a different experience when my colleagues or I plan and run it then when I sat through it as a partaker. Yesterday, Alicia ran chapel, and she did a wonderful job. First she led singing with her ukulele and we sang Trust and Obey, Did You Ever Talk to God Above?, and "The Steadfast Love of the Lord Never Ceases," and they trippy part for me was that we sang T&O; and DYETtGA from the very same poster-lyric-book things that I had sung from in my elementray chapel days. WELL, I was the holder-of-the-lyric-placard, and it was so good for my soul to hear all the children's voices as they sang the songs. It is a unique experience, a reminder of the kind of faith we each need now.
There is nothing wrong with debating doctrine and philosophical questions until we all go mad like the hatter, but I think that at places where Great Hall discussions regularly include the benefits and problems with the regulative principle, it's easy to worry about Platonism and Neo-Platonism and angels who dance on heads of pins and about the appropriateness of uncovered women's heads in worship and lose sight of nourishing our faith, which really just needs to be as simple and robust as that of a child's.
Posted by at October 9, 2003 06:17 PM | TrackBack