By Victoria Arndt
Here at Houghton University, students are required to attend a mandatory chapel service on Mondays and Fridays, with an Around the Table program on Wednesdays which allows students to hear about God’s work in the lives of others.
Although these chapel times help students have a break between classes and let them give a moment of their time towards God, I’ve found that sometimes I head to chapel with a faint feeling of dread, not because there are many other things I could be doing with that time, but because of what the message will be that day.
Since my freshman year, I quickly came to realize that I wasn’t connecting to the messages I was hearing in chapel. It wasn’t that the messages were bad or held no relevance to us as students, but that they didn’t resonate with me in the way I thought they would. Some messages had little relation to the Bible verses read before it, instead mostly focusing on a current-day issue or concept rather than how the verses tied into the message, while others had good relation between message and verses but felt a little lackluster in terms of spiritual emphasis on God or what the Bible was trying to teach us through the verse. Some messages from guest speakers even felt more than a little preachy on their topics, speaking directly on the topic with no mention of God or the Bible. It was all well and good, but those messages left me feeling confused and most of all dissatisfied, with me questioning how I was to utilize what I’d heard when I felt no emotional connection or calling towards it, especially when it felt like I had just been listening to someone’s soapbox rant for half an hour and had gotten nothing substantial out of it.
More often than not, instead of the speakers’ messages actually affecting me and making me want to listen to what they had to say, their messages started to lose my interest as soon as I heard more about current-day issues rather than the goodness of God. At times it was even frustrating, and it made me start to wonder if the chapel message I was about to hear was going to be about the Bible and God in a way that resonated with my spirit, or if it would just be another sermon on more world issues.
Don’t get me wrong. I understand the importance of speaking on current-day issues and how we are supposed to approach them as believers in the Church. Christianity and worldliness go hand in hand, and it’s definitely important to hear about issues that affect us as individuals and as fellow Christians and what we can do to help change them. But when I attend chapel, I want to listen to a message that encourages me to continue my walk with God, not hear about another worldly issue that I personally am not called to change or can change from where I currently stand. I want to hear about how a particular verse can relate to me as a Christian and as a weary college student, not on topics I hear about nonstop on social media. Chapel is supposed to be a time when we can relax and spend a moment with God and hear a small message to encourage us throughout the rest of our day. When that time is filled with topics other than God and the Word, what once was a time of worship and reflection becomes a time of listening to what feels like activism from the pulpit, with messages that have nothing to spiritually or emotionally connect with.
My point here is not to slight any of the chapel speakers or their messages, but just to share the respectful musings of a college student looking for more God and less world in the messages she hears during chapel. My hope is that future chapel messages will have a more spiritually substantial and emotional impact on its listeners going forward, not through simply discussing modern issues and problems, but with an emphasis on the power and hope of God as something to look to even throughout troubling times, so that those who need to hear a certain message on those days can hear a message that encourages their souls. ★