by Mark Milioni
One of my greatest memories of BBC is chapel services. My wife and I would take our seats in the Fieldhouse and chapel would begin with Wilma Boyd sounding the notes of “Victory in Jesus” on the organ. Mrs. Boland would join in on the piano and Doc Boland would begin to sing. Soon the entire arena would be filled with voices singing about the old, old story. We had great chapel speakers including A. V. Henderson, John Rawlings, and the unforgettable R. O. Woodworth, who once stopped mid sermon when he realized he was late for a dentist appointment. I loved chapel. I listened and kept notes, knowing I would need those outlines and great illustrations when I became a preacher.
I still love chapel at BBC. The place and music have changed, but the spirit and the message have remained the same. We come together to worship, learn, bond, and to be challenged to change the world.
Chapel always has and always will be our key to success as a college. Elmer Towns explains it best in his book Walking with Giants. He conducted a survey among the largest churches in the late 1960s and asked them this question, “What college or seminary did you attend that equipped you to build one of the largest churches in America?” He writes about what he found:
I expected the responses to include schools like Wheaton and Moody, they were not there. Twenty-three of the pastors were graduates of, or otherwise associated with, Baptist Bible College in Springfield, Missouri.
I’ve got to find out why that college is so great, I thought.
I flew to Springfield, unannounced. The first place I visited was the library; I figured a great influential college would be driven by a great library. What a shock to find only one room with bookshelves on the four walls. There were no stacks, and fewer than 5,000 books.
I had taken great Bible classes, so I was sure that the classes at BBC would be even greater … but the classes were normal, not any better, not any worse than my college courses.
Then I went to chapel. Dr. John Rawlings, pastor of Landmark Baptist Temple, was preaching, and he said, “Young men, when you graduate, get in your jalopy, drive to someplace like Keokuk, Iowa, and capture your town for Christ.
That was when I realized that the greatness of this college stemmed from the greatness of the speakers in chapel. To produce burning hearts for evangelism in its graduates, the school’s leaders kept the chapel pulpit hot.
Speakers like Otis Ledbetter, Jerry Thorpe, Duke Hergatt, Ted Cunningham, Elmer Towns, Harold Rawlings, and Jack Eggar have kept the chapel pulpit hot this past year. Check out all our chapel services at www.youtube.com/user/GOBBCvideos. I hope you will be blessed.