Chapel

Students, faculty, and staff are invited once a week to attend these campus worship services that include music, prayer, and teaching. The campus pastor, members of the community, and speakers from across the country and around the world engage our hearts and minds with the truth of Scripture and challenge us to live it out in practical ways. A variety of worship styles drawn from various traditions, from classical to charismatic, African-American to Hispanic, liturgical to contemporary, make each service something unique.

Chapel takes place every Wednesday morning at 10:30 in Anderson Chapel.

Chapel Schedule with Speakers

ECCENTRIC: UMIN THEME 2012-2013


Up until the time of Copernicus in the year 1543 the whole world believed that the earth was at the center of the universe and that the sun revolved around the earth.People would literally look up at the sky and say, “Everything revolves around us”. But Copernicus put forth the idea that the earth actually orbited around the sun, and it was scandalous and those that followed Copernicus were considered out of their minds.

While science has freed us from our captivity to believing the earth is the center of our universe, unfortunately even though we no longer believe this about the planet we live upon so many of us who live on the earth still tend to believe that the world revolves around us. And because following Christ doesn’t work that way and because we are a distinctively Christian university, this year I am inviting all of us to a Copernican revolution, to an ec-centric (which simply means off-center) life, a life where we choose to put Jesus Christ at the center, a life where we make an intentional move away from our self-centered lives and choose to orbit around God.


UMIN THEME: ECCENTRIC

 

Up until the time of Copernicus in the year 1543 the whole world believed that the earth was at the center of the universe and that the sun revolved around the earth.People would literally look up at the sky and say, “Everything revolves around us”. But Copernicus put forth the idea that the earth actually orbited around the sun, and it was scandalous and those that followed Copernicus were considered out of their minds.

While science has freed us from our captivity to believing the earth is the center of our universe, unfortunately even though we no longer believe this about the planet we live upon so many of us who live on the earth still tend to believe that the world revolves around us. And because following Christ doesn’t work that way and because we are a distinctively Christian university, this year I am inviting all of us to a Copernican revolution, to an ec-centric (which simply means off-center) life, a life where we choose to put Jesus Christ at the center, a life where we make an intentional move away from our self-centered lives and choose to orbit around God.

Galatians 2:20 will be the verse we will use to pilot us through this ec-centric process and I challenge you to commit it to memory so that it can take a more central place in your thinking and doing.  I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.

What the Bible makes very clear in this passage is that pursuing an ec-centric life will require that we enter a process of death and resurrection; a process where we let our affinities, our desires, our preferences and comfort zones, our compulsions, obsessions, addictions and predictions, die. And we commit to this dying, so that the love, joy, and justice, peace, patience, and preferences, kindness, goodness, and godliness, faithfulness, gentleness, and humbleness, hopefulness, truthfulness and holiness of Jesus Christ might truly LIVE through us.

Pursing this ec-centric life requires that we enter into the process of death and resurrection. And because you have to die in order to be resurrected that’s where we are going begin with a call for us to die so that Christ can live in us. Isn’t that great news for the beginning of the year! So let me begin by sharing with you your first strategy for dying.

 It was for the“joy set before him that Jesus endured the cross.” (Hebrew 12:2)

We enter into this process and continue toward our own crucifixion because we keep before our eyes, the joy that is before us, the joy that will come when all our pettiness and particularities, gossip and garbage, judgment and jealousies, addictions and afflictions keel over dead.  For the joy set before us…we endure the dying.

I am confident that joy will rise to the ceiling, burst right out of our buildings and out our campus when together we make daily choices to no longer be the center of ourselves but instead choose to become ec-centric so that the God of the Universe can be raised to life in middle of us. Oh the joy that is set before us when we begin to be off-center. May the promise of this joy get you going toward dying.

Pastor Judy