Religions and Church…

Those are words I don’t use that much in my day to day life. I consider myself as I Christian but not a really practicing one since I only go to church at Christmas and on some other rare occasion.

However, I’m now at Whitworth which is a proud Christian school with for example 1 church and 1 chapel on campus.

What does that mean?

Basically, the Christian part doesn’t change a lot to me since I’m still respecting all the Christian value in my day-to-day life without associating them with religion at all, just with respect.

The main thing is that most student here are openly proud Christians who goes to church every Sunday and need a really good excuse to miss it. From my European point of view this is kind of impressive to find so many practicing teenagers, but I think that this is not (entirely) related to Whitworth, it’s just related to the US, here people are deep believers and faith plays a huge role in the life of most Americans. Also, the choice of the church to go to on Sunday is a big decision that can takes month for a freshman. A church in the US is a community that you need to find, every place is different with different people and different ways of worshiping and they don’t just go to the closest church as I would do.

Obviously, most of the students chose Whitworth because of the religious part and so any typical private college doesn’t have that much Christians as Whitworth but still more than an European one. Hence, lots of wordship opportunities are given during the week, there’s obviously church on Sundays but there’s also chapel on Tuesdays and Thursday morning and other stuff that I probably don’t know about. The only thing I go to is called Hosanna, on Tuesday night, it’s a student-lead worship group that basically sing Christian song for one hour all together. This has a really nice and moving atmosphere, not formal at all since only students are present.

The only official and mandatory thing at Whitworth related to religion is that you must follow the Big Three. All related to the Christian value of don’t bother the others, breaking one of these big three will more than probably see you expel from Whitworth so don’t do it. The first one is just no violence or destruction of property, it’s pretty basic but since it’s in the school rule, you can (and will) be expelled if you fight on campus. The second one, is “no cohabitation” which means you can’t have sex on campus and to avoid all doubts from your RA, a boy and a girl can’t be in a room alone if the door is closed. This is also a rule that prevent you from nearly making out with your boyfriend while your roommate just wants to study. The last one (and my favorite one), is no alcohol or drugs on campus. I don’t like alcohol and I’m anyway not 21, so this just simplify my life but most of all, this just creates a good ambiance on campus. Every activity we do, everybody is sober and so everybody stays responsible all night long and when we end we can all clean our mess. I just feel this create a positive, safe, healthy and friendly environment. However, if you want to drink, just go out of campus anywhere in the city and when you come back try to act as sober as possible (or just not too drunk) and basically, just let everyone sleeps.

 That’s it for now about what I had to say about church and faith as I see it in Whitworth but if you want to talk to me about cultural perspective on this, I’m super interested so don’t hesitate to text me at +32491306556 or email me at elise.baguette@gmail.com