Regarding Chapel benefits

Are students benefiting Chapel, or is Chapel benefiting students?

Jesus asked a similar question about the religious laws concerning the Sabbath.

He saw how the religious laws of the Pharisees were denying the people their basic needs and rights according to religious standards.

He reminded the religious administrators that one’s faithfulness to God was based upon their generosity and concern for “the least of these,” not according to wealth or religious traditions.

Jesus sought to make the basic needs of the people more readily available and not constrained by religious or superfluous traditions and policies.

A four-year college education is not just a commodity of the wealthy anymore, and it should not be denied according to a religious tradition.

When students are denied opportunities to learn and apply themselves within today’s competitive global market based upon religious practices, we must ask ourselves how students are benefiting from Chapel.

Constantine instituted Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire in 325 A.D., and it allowed his newly acquired empire to display a remarkable display of unity and solidarity.

However, America’s founding fathers later saw that this policy was destructive since it denied the basic needs of the people according to religious traditions and not according to one’s character and work ethic.

Should we continue to give the bread and water of education to others only after they have been to mass and said their penance?

www.wikipedia.com describes ACU as the largest institution in the country that continues to deny educational opportunities to students based upon a religious tradition like Chapel.

If Jesus saw the Sabbath as a possibly beneficial religious tradition, maybe Chapel could as well.

If “Faith and Excellence” is our goal and motto, then maybe we can reassess our faithfulness to God as being a university focused on meeting the educational needs of “the least of these”.

A Christian university that constrains the basic educational opportunities of its students, according to religious traditions and superfluous policies, like iPhones, needs to remember that the Sabbath was supposed to be a blessing.

Matthew Walker
graduate student from Abilene
mxw03b@acu.edu