By Kathryna Hoyman · Managing Editor
This week, the college’s chapel program hosted local Grace Anglican Church to perform an Ash Wednesday service in our very own Harbison Chapel.
Ash Wednesday marks the start of Lent, the 40 days preceding Easter. Lent is observed by the Catholic Church through spiritual and physical fasting, with an abstinence from meat on Fridays. Many Protestant denominations observe the season as well, including the Anglican Church of North America, of which Grace Anglican is a part.
The service in Harbison included worship, largely led by students who serve at Grace, liturgy from the 2019 Book of Common Prayer, readings from the Old and New Testament, a sermon and the imposition of ashes, when the laypeople draw crosses over the members of the congregation in the shape of a cross. According to the service’s bulletin, “Bearing ashes is not a boastful sign of our own righteousness, but of our profound need for the external redemption brought to us by Christ alone.”
Rev. Dr. Donald Shepson, who also teaches at the college as a professor of Christian ministries, officiated the service. He emphasized that while Lent is a time of penitence, it is ultimately a recognition of Christ’s great mercy and the hope he extends to sinners.
“(While) there are unique spiritual disciplines that are encouraged during the Lenten season … almsgiving, fasting, special time of prayer … really what’s happening there is not about fasting as much as it is about preparing our hearts for the week of what’s called Holy Week, the week before Jesus’s death and resurrection,” Shepson said.
Grace Anglican’s Rev. Ethan Magness shared the same sentiment in the message he delivered. “This is the time to unhide, to confess, to be real, to get help, to forfeit, to be wrong, to not know, to learn, to admit your dark secret, to get counseling, to fast, to really pray, to succeed, to fail, to not care if you fail, to learn to be still, to find out that you’re far worse than ever imagined and that God’s grace runs deeper still and always will,” he said. “You have nothing to lose but your chains.”
Grace Anglican hosted a 12:10 p.m. service at their regular church location that same day, which included the sacrament of communion, but students, faculty and Grove City residents still showed up at 7 p.m. to fill the pews of Harbison Chapel.
Dr. Don Opitz, the college’s chaplain and senior director of Christian Formation, expressed enthusiasm over giving the student body a chance to experience a liturgical style of worship on campus. The last similar collaboration between Grace Anglican and the college that Shepson remembered was during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the faculty allowed on campus worked with the student body to host weekly in-person church services in Crawford Auditorium.
Following the Ash Wednesday service, many members will observe a time of fasting over the Lenten period.
“The reason fasting is valuable is that when we fast … we get cranky. And it shows our true selves, because we often satiate our emotions with food. And so, when we fast, what it does is it shows the real stuff that’s inside,” Shepson said. “And then confession is another one of those key disciplines during Lent … And what we’re doing is we’re recognizing our sinfulness in preparation to see what our sinfulness does, and to see God’s goodness to us by sending Jesus to deal with that stuff.”
The Ash Wednesday service on campus brought two communities together to recognize the need, sufficiency and great hope of the gospel. In the words of the service’s bulletin, “It is in this sure hope that we begin the journey of these 40 days, that by hearing and answering our Savior’s call to repent, we may enter fully into the joyful celebration of his resurrection.”
