The Point of Friction

This is a post I never finished last year. It's about one of my most frustrating moments at George Fox. I haven't gone to chapel at all this year since I am not required to do so as a senior. It has been fantastic.

As many of you may know, I've had concerns about chapel in the past, but this was the last straw for me. I was appalled at what was happening in that auditorium. I left, literally shaking with rage. I barely knew what to do with myself. "How can a Christian university present such blatantly paganistic material in chapel?" I thought. "And how can it present it without explaining that it is NOT within the realm of christianity?" Though I did not stay for the rest of the chapel service, I did watch the podcast, which confirmed my fears about the theological solidity of the speakers. Instead of standing on a position that is clearly delineated in the bible, the speakers came in with a prefabricated idea and used out of context scripture to back it up. That makes me angry. Their use of Psalms and other wisdom books to personify nature and give the moon and stars and animals literal voices was at best poor exegesis and at worst downright manipulation of the very Word of God. That makes me angry, but it also makes God angry, which is far worse. Equating the creation with the creator is idolatry.

I sat at a table in the quad, furious, not knowing what to do. I began to write stuff down, but I was so angry and my hand was shaking so badly that I couldn't write anything. I finally went to the president's office to talk with him about what was happening in chapel, but he wasn't in, so I scheduled a meeting with the director of Student Life for Wednesday.

My roommate and I went to the talkback session later that night, which is a panel discussion with the speakers from chapel. Many people were in complete agreement with the speakers, enamored with new ways of experiencing God. I straight up asked them if our relationship to the creation or the creator was more important. And they avoided my question, calling it a false dichotomy. Saying that we can't really separate the two. That avoidance of my question was very revealing because I would argue that one should not hesitate for an instant in the answer to that question, and that the answer should be that our relationship to the creator is far more important than our relationship to creation. The GFU professor turned my question back onto me, saying "Well it says in the New Testament that we are to love God and love our neighbor, but would you say that one is more important than the other?" Unfortunately, he didn't let me answer, but I would have said that loving God is more important without hesitation. We can love our neighbors (and creation) without loving God, but if we love God first, our love of our neighbor (and creation) flows from that, not the other way around.

Fast-forward to Wednesday morning. A group of 15-20 students had come to join me in the meeting with the director of student life, who was sympathetic to our position. He said that he would not defend anything said or done in chapel on Monday, so we discussed our concerns with chapel in general. Many, if not all of us present, saw that chapel was without spiritual substance, full of bad teaching, and presented as a method of spiritual guidance.

The director of student life was willing to listen and appreciated the way we went about addressing this issue. We presented some alternatives to chapel, including differentiating between a chapel and an assembly, which would simply be a gathering of the student body that is not primarily spiritual in nature, and providing other venues for spiritual growth such as smaller bible studies led by those trained in the scriptures.

There was talk of how George Fox had to be sensitive to people of many different denominations, levels of spiritual maturity, and styles of worship. Chapel was not, therefore, the time or place to provide spiritual meat, but rather it was a better place for spiritual milk. But if the milk is sour, it's not doing young christians any good. If the spiritual milk that is being provided is confusing to older believers, what is it going to do for new Christians? The one thing every true Christian has in common, no matter what denomination they come from, is the gospel message. The gospel is not being preached in chapel. Scripture is barely being preached in chapel."