Remembering Taking Sides chapel

With the start of the spring 2026 semester came the end of a well-loved small chapel, Taking Sides. 

Brian Simmons, dean of the College of Liberal Arts, created the small chapel alongside several students 10 years ago. The goal was to encourage thoughtful dialogue on difficult topics.

“We wanted to create something that would model civil discourse but also bless the campus by airing opposite sides of topics we think they might be interested in, in particular, topics that had a religious dimension today,” Simmons said.

Senior Sydney Byers, who served as president of Taking Sides, said the chapel played a meaningful role in her college experience. As president, she helped organize and facilitate the weekly meetings.

“I ran the meetings. So on Monday nights at 5, I would either pick the topic, or we would vote on a topic, and then I would write down what everyone’s ideas were. I just kept track of all of the points that were being made,” Byers said. “I helped assign who was doing which one. It’s all volunteer based. So people would volunteer for the topics they wanted, but I would help keep track of that, and I helped send out the notes to the people who were doing.”

Byers said the depth of the conversations was her favorite part of being involved.

“I just really love good conversation. And so a lot of the topics we picked were things that I was curious about too,” Byers said. “I really liked bringing to light things that I knew I had questions about, because I figured other people would also have questions about it, and then being able to share that.”

Those conversations were just as meaningful to Simmons, who said his favorite part of Taking Sides was the weekly meetings used to prepare for chapel discussions.

“We would select the topics, and then we would go to a large whiteboard or a TV screen, and we developed the arguments on both sides of the topic, and it was just a free flowing discussion,” Simmons said. “We would laugh, we would challenge each other, we would open Bibles and look at scriptures, and it was highly educational for the students, which is part of what we were trying to do. We built a lot of camaraderie, and we just really felt like we were doing good.”

After a decade on campus, Simmons said the decision to end Taking Sides was difficult and driven by declining student availability.

“It was a very difficult decision. In order for Taking Sides chapel to happen, there needs to be a sufficient number of students that can invest the time to prepare and then deliver the chapel each week. And it takes a certain number of students who have a skill set to be able to do that,” Simmons said. “In previous years, we had a large enough number of students that had the skill set and the time to devote to Taking Sides chapel, but more recently, the number of students that were able to do that was shrinking.” 

“We finally got to a point at the end of last semester where we just didn’t have enough students with the skill set and the time to invest to continue and so rather than trying to limp along and continue to do it, just to do it, we wanted to make sure we could continue to do it well,” Simmons said. “And so we made the decision that it was in the best interest to say all ministries have a life cycle. And the point had simply come in the life cycle of the Taking Sides chapel ministry to end it.”

Despite its conclusion, both Byers and Simmons said they are hopeful Taking Sides could return in the future.

“It might come back again eventually. I hope so, because it was really impactful for a lot of people, and I loved doing it,” Byers said.

“It may well come back again at some point in the future, if there’s sufficient student interest. I’ve been in higher education long enough to have seen that happen in the past, but I don’t know when that might happen,” Simmons said. 

“Sometimes people don’t value things until they’re gone,” Simmons said.