I really, really, really hated my first chapel at George Fox University.

It was my first week of college, far away from home, trying to make friends, absolutely afraid. The only thing keeping me from entirely combusting in a ball of homesick anxiety was the knowledge that God wanted me at this college; for the first time, I’d be in an entirely Christian community, and I’d grow deeper than ever spiritually. This first Wednesday night at seven, I blindly followed some people from dinner to the “chapel building,” and we ended up sitting in the balcony.

Everyone around me was either on laptops, on phones, talking at a normal volume with the person next to them or (yes) listening to football highlights with no headphones. I couldn’t hear the lady pastor speaking even if I wanted to, and I felt awkward caring at all about what was happening in the front of the room.

I hated it. So much for a Christian college. So much for Christian community. No one cared.

I gradually got less anxious about college, and I gradually started learning more about the world of thought and faith. I read Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Athanasius. I learned theology, I learned Church history, I was exposed to a kind of church experience different from the simple born-again faith of my high school years.

I never sat in the noisy, apathetic balcony again, but I started hating chapel for other reasons. It seemed shallow, worthless, somehow wrong. What I learned in class didn’t mesh with what was offered to me in chapel. It felt bad-youth-group-y; it felt vaguely misleading. I sensed similar thoughts from my colleagues and we all agreed: chapel was awful.

So much for growing deeply in my faith.

Something's changed this past year, though. Right around 10:40 a.m. on the second Tuesday of this semester, I found myself feeling relaxed and filled, not unwilling and annoyed. I enjoyed being next to my peers, singing and letting my thoughts turn to God in the middle of an otherwise mentally taxing day of classes.

I hate chapel a lot less than I used to, and now that I do, here are some thoughts I've been having about it:

It is fruitful and good to immerse yourself in different faith traditions.

This last summer, I accepted an internship with a church that I had never attended. It didn’t take me very long into the internship to realize that it wasn’t the kind of church I would have chosen to go to. However, I was going to be there for four months whether I liked it or not, so I quickly learned how to reconcile what I wanted from a church community with what I got.

I believe deeply that it is a good church – nothing they do is “wrong.” It just wasn’t a perfect, comfortable fit for me. And I don’t know how to explain the vast amount of growth this experience gave me. Being committed to serve a community whose practices didn’t entirely match my own tendencies and preferences (as right as I find those preferences of mine to be), gave me a much wider love for the whole gamut of true Church tradition.

I think chapel provides the perfect space to practice a similar thing. Without the commitment of staying at a different church for several months, chapel on campus gives you the opportunity to find truth within practices that aren’t yours: whether they seem “too simple” for you, “too old fashioned,” or “too” anything in between.

Chapel is not church.

This might have been the best advice I received from upperclassmen my freshman year. They warned not to use mandatory chapel as my spiritual fulfillment for the week.

If chapel is the place where you open yourself up to different faith traditions, church is the place where you have a consistent community and consistent practices. Mixing the purposes of the two is bound to cause distress.

Your faith is your responsibility.

I think it might be a uniquely “church kid” mindset to believe that a certain church, a good pastor, or a relevant program dictates the quality of your personal faith. Your faith is controlled by nothing other than God and your own self. The point of church, chapel and other services isn’t to fill up your faith-o-meter through the most entertaining or enlightening content – rather, I believe it’s to encourage your faith through physically gathering together with other humans to worship God, be in His presence and learn through others’ contributions and thoughts on Him.

If your faith is so flimsy that hearing a speaker talk about something you don’t agree with makes you worry about your spiritual health, perhaps there are deeper problems you must address in yourself.

SpIL people are people.

Don’t unconsciously villainize them. Don’t allow them to be the people you see up on a stage in a spotlight once or twice a week. I only say that because I think that’s what I’d done to them my previous years at Fox.

This year, I’ve run into each of the campus pastors several times in entirely non-SpIL contexts; I’ve seen them with their families; I’ve exchanged words with them to their faces. Now, suddenly, they don’t seem like villainous, theology-dictating monsters. They’re people. If you think they’re bad, try having a conversation with one.

This is a Christian college.

This is the most solid argument I can give myself for why we have mandatory chapels: it’s part of what makes this a Christian university. I signed a lifestyle contract that said I was okay with having 15 required chapel credits every semester. I anticipated this coming in, and so should a non-Christian (or any denomination of Christian) student, because we chose this Christian institution. (And I can't help but mention: as far as required chapels at Christian colleges go, Fox is really quite lenient. Looking at you, NNU... and APU... and almost every other Christian university.)

There are many options for chapel.

As much as you might hate Tuesday chapels or Wednesday chapels, there are so many good elective chapels. I think you can be exposed to more cultures and faith traditions through chapel electives than in most other places in everyday life. Personally, through chapel and electives, I’ve been introduced to traditions like advent, Ash Wednesday and lent; and I’ve also learned a lot about particularly Quaker ideals – everything from the value of silence to the necessity of creating justice and equality in the world. Between international chapels, Spanish chapels, Shalom, lectures, evening prayer, colloquiums and everything else offered, elective chapel could be a rare opportunity to find something comfortable or to branch out into something a little less familiar.

A non-mandatory chapel is impractical.

I will be the first to readily admit: If chapel wasn’t required, I would not go. Not because my faith is wavering, not because I have an agenda against SpIL, not because I hate Jesus: just because I’m a busy college student. I’m certain that if I weighed my mandatory 15-page paper against an optional hour-long spiritual gathering, the paper would win out.

Mandatory chapel forces a break of spiritual space in my day that I wouldn’t set aside otherwise, with a spiritual atmosphere that I couldn’t quite build anywhere else in my life.

I’m not saying chapel is perfect. I could do for more transparency financially, relationally and spiritually within leadership; but I also understand that vulnerability is hard to achieve when students are on such different pages. I’d love to see a wider range of church practices offered within the Tuesday and Wednesday chapel slots. And, honestly, I'd love to see a ban of the worship song "Bursting;" it's dreadfully catchy and never fails to make my soul cringe.

But all in all, though the execution may not be perfect, I firmly believe that mandatory chapel is not the worst thing in the world.