CCM announces chapel series ‘Faces of Faith’
The Samuel Tyndale Williams Campus Center for Campus Ministry (CCM) kicked off its new chapel series on Sept. 6, with Rev. Anne McKee, MC campus minister, as the featured speaker for the service. The new series, entitled “Faces of Faith,” will continue through the fall semester.
McKee says that the inspiration for this series’ theme came from a sermon that she delivered last spring in a chapel service. The sermon focused on one biblical character’s experience with God. The response to the sermon was overwhelmingly good. This sermon was the springboard for “Faces of Faith.”
The leaders of the CCM noted that people are drawn to stories and find the characters in them very relatable. The theme also provided a topic that was broad enough to encompass the various faith traditions at Maryville and provocative enough to cause students to raise questions about the ways in which one relates to God.
The focus of this series is not supposed to be the lives of personal faith figures in the speakers’ lives (i.e. grandmothers, Sunday school teachers). Rather, the series will focus on characters in biblical scripture or important public figures in other faith traditions.
Learning from others’ stories allows the faithful to observe ways in which other saints who have gone before them have wrestled with the challenges of living a life based on faith and to then be encouraged and inspired to follow in their footsteps.
McKee stated: “One of the basic principles of Christianity is that we know God through people’s lives. We see the face of God through the life of Jesus. I believe this is how God chooses to be known.”
The series will feature many members of the Maryville College community, including Preston Fields, director of community engagement; Eric Bellah, director of the Maryville Fund; and Terry Simpson, chair of the division of education, through the month of September. McKee expressed excitement about the positive response this series has already received from the student body.
The CCM invites all students, faculty and other members of the Maryville College community to come be a part of this exciting new series. Chapel is held every Tuesday at 1:15 p.m. in the CCM.