Christmas at Ouachita is a time for celebrating Christ’s birth. Students and faculty will have the opportunity to come together and celebrate this event during the fourth annual Candlelight Christmas Service.
The service will be held Monday, Dec. 7, at 5 p.m. in the amphitheater.
“It’s not so much [an event] for large crowds as it is a symbolic way of celebrating Christmas,” said Dr. Rex Horne Jr., president of Ouachita.
Horne wants the service to be a time for students and faculty to take a break during the end of the semester to celebrate Christ’s birth.
“It’s a nice way to stop and pause at the end of a busy semester,” Horne said.
The service is meant to help students and faculty to reflect on the meaning of the season and get into the Christmas mood.
“It adds not only a sense of how special the season is, but also a sense of how unique Ouachita is in playing into the history that God and the Lord are instrumental in development,” Horne said.
This year, the president’s office decided to partner with Campus Ministries to plan the event.
Planning for the service started early in the semester when Horne’s office and the Campus Ministries office began to plan how to involve Ouachita students more in the event.
“We felt that this service was something we could partner together on as a way to help the OBU community begin the Christmas season,” said James Taylor, director of Campus Ministries.
There was a brief interruption in the planning when Terese Cox, assistant director of Campus Ministries, gave birth to Nathaniel Fifer Cox on Oct. 29, and Taylor’s wife, Amy, to Benjamin Parker Taylor on Oct. 31.
Taylor and Cox met with a student team in early November to work on “the details and planning,” Taylor said.
“Students have agreed to help with planning the service, publicizing it and working on some of the logistics of doing an outdoor service,” Taylor said.
The Ouachita Student Foundation is also involved in helping with some of logistics and is another way that students are helping with the event.
“It’s great to have students involved,” Horne said. “Because nobody on campus at this time of year is looking for just one more thing to do, so if it’s not something that’s pretty special and that gets involvement of students, it wouldn’t be nearly as effective.”
The service will be candlelit because “lights are so much a part of the Christmas season,” Horne said. “I always think of Christ coming as the light of the world and it’s a visual way of remembering that he’s the light and we are to be light ourselves.”
Horne said that even thought candlelight has been used for many years in many different ways it is still “one of the best ways to remember the coming of Christ and what he represents to us.”
The service is set in the late afternoon to catch people on their way to and from campus events.
“We would encourage folks on campus to just drop by,” Horne said. “We keep it brief for a reason to catch people going and coming. It’s a nice way to stop and pause as we move toward the end of the semester, toward Christmas.”
