Here's the video from last Wednesday's chapel:


O.C.H.S. Chapel on December 11, 2013 from Ontario Christian School on Vimeo.

Video from Chapel on December 4, 2013:
OCHS Chapel on December 4, 2013 from Ontario Christian School on Vimeo.

Chapel video from November 22

OCHS Chapel on November 22, 2013 from Ontario Christian School on Vimeo.

Chapel video from November 15

O.C.H.S. Chapel on November 15, 2013 from Ontario Christian School on V

Video for today's chapel

Here's the video of today's service.  There's more to come later.


O.C.H.S. Chapel on October 30, 2013 from Ontario Christian School on Vimeo.

Chapel on 10.9.13

Posted by Sydney Peauroi, Junior at OCHS

For chapel this week we focused on 1 Peter 5:7 “Cast all your anxiety on Him because He cares for you.” As High school students and people in general, it is easy to get into an endless cycle of worrying. This cycle can be easily broken by going to God and giving your worries up to Him.

We started chapel with a skit that sums up the entire chapel, called “Are You Like Me.” The skit shows three people who worry and one person who gives their worries to God. After the skit we read a few verses from Psalms 55 that are examples of God’s promise to take our worries away from us. With those examples in mind we touched on a few common worries that can plague our lives.

We also outlined a few things that worrying can do to our bodies, ranging from something as small headaches to possibly thoughts of suicide. With the knowledge of what worrying can do to our bodies we sought the answer the question of how to deal with our worries. This brought us back to the Bible, where we read more verses on worry.

Due to the amount of scripture on worrying, we offered to the idea that our worries are less about us, and more about God. Here we sang “Blessed Be Your Name” to direct our attention to God. With this new attitude we offered a time of response for the students, where they wrote a worry on a note card while the chapel team sang ”Waiting Here for You”

We closed by looking back to the Bible to provide some evidence of who God is, showing us exactly why we can trust Him with something as serious as our worries. as we dismissed, we sang ”Desert Song” and gave the students the opportunity to “throw away” their worry.

Full video:

10.9.13 1 Peter 5.7 from Ontario Christian School on Vimeo.

Chapel 10.2.13

Posted by Joey Ginacola, Senior at O.C.H.S.

This week’s chapel focused on words from Romans 5 about life through Christ.  We can often become weighed down by our sin and begin to doubt the promise of salvation God gives us through His Son.  This often leads to fear and forgetting that God has already promised us salvation and won the battle over death.

We opened by reading Psalm 100 and singing Awesome Is the Lord Most High by Chris Tomlin.  Then we dove straight into Romans 5 to unpack the multitude of things that it says for us.  Verse 1 says that “we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,” meaning that God is no longer angry with us.  Jesus has already paid the price for our sins on the cross; we have been justified with his blood.  It is hard to wrap our minds around God’s grace. As sinful people, it’s hard to understand how merciful God is too us.  But it’s important to remember that in Christ we no longer have to fear death because God has given us everlasting life with Him. 

Afterwards, we jumped into some text from 2 Timothy 1  about how God has called us to live a holy life.  Since God has already saved us from death, we don’t live in fear of death but rather out of gratitude for life.  God has already given us  more than we deserve. As Christians, it's our call to live in thanksgiving and gratitude.

Sometimes we become disillusioned by sin and start to doubt our place in God’s plan.  However, God can use us in our imperfection.  We projected a Prezi with examples of many influential Biblical characters who were used despite their sin.  We were reminded that God does not just look to call the qualified. Instead, He looks to qualify those he calls.  It’s important for us to remember that God does not expect us to be perfect.  Though we are sinful, He still has a spot for us in his kingdom.

After a time of silent reflection and prayer we closed by singing How He Loves and The Stand. This gave us a chance to reflect on God’s everlasting love and then surrender to His plan for our lives. 

OCHS Chapel on October 2, 2013 from Ontario Christian School on Vimeo.

Chapel 9.25.13

This week's chapel focused on the last verse of our theme for this year: "For we are God's handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do." (Eph. 2:10) As originators, Mr. Dykhouse and I knew we wanted to give students an opportunity to respond in a visual/creative way to tie in with the idea of being God's workmanship.

We opened with another OC favorite - 10,000 Reasons by Matt Redman - and then moved into a reading of Ephesians 2 to give ourselves a little context for our theme verses. After our students shared a few thoughts on the meaning of this verse they invited Mr. Huisken (our art teacher) to come up and read a blog post written by a pastor at a church in Maryland. This reading spoke about how God works not as a manufacturer, putting out thousands of carbon-copies of the same thing, but as an artist who individually creates His own self-portrait in each of us.

After a time of meditation and silent prayer about what it means to be God's handiwork, we sang Take My Life and worshiped in a visual way by inviting people to step up to one of four easels we had set around the chapel. We asked students to respond to the open-ended question, "What has God been teaching you through our theme verses for this year?" and had a time of singing and prayer while people wrote a few words or a sentence on one of the boards. We had some questions heading into our service about what kind of response we'd see, but the student body at OC heard the Holy Spirit's call and responded in a really terrific way.

We're hoping to hang these responses somewhere on campus so that throughout the year we can continue to be reminded of what Ephesians 2:8-10 means for us.

OCHS Chapel on September 25, 2013 from Ontario Christian School on Vimeo.

Chapel Retreat

Last weekend, we (Ms. Dorn and I) asked our Chapel Leadership students to make a sacrifice: give up your precious, sleep-filled Saturday morning to spend it at school.  For the past five or six years, we have annually held a "Chapel Leadership Retreat" on one of the first Saturday mornings in September.  Over the years, it's been a great way to team-build and get a head start on planning chapels.

This year, our retreat consisted of of the following:

• Sharing our "Prezis."  This is a tool (Ms. Dorn used it last week to create a piece for chapel) that is useful for making creative presentations.  Students were asked to answer the question: "Who am I as a worshipper?"  Prezi allows users to include video, text, images, and movement.  The Prezis were projected and students accompanied this with verbal explanations. Below are a few student Prezis. 

• We also spent a considerable amount of time wrestling and discussing the question: "What is worship?"  During the year, we expect our view of worship to be shaped by God through our worship-leading experiences.  However, we also want to remember what we had already learned at the beginning of the school year.  So, we made a "collage" of sorts on butcher paper.  We wrote down the question and instructed students to remain quiet.  If they had a thought they should write it and make associations.  Here is what we produced:

• From this activity, we realized that worship is far bigger than we imagined.  Most of us agreed that we could have continued this brainstorm for quite some time.  We worship a great God!

• Of course, a retreat could not be complete without food.  We ate well.  Sydney's chocolate milk, Ms. Dorn's breakfast casserole, and Mrs. Storms cookies were only a few of the highlights!

As mentors of this team, Ms. Dorn and I are so excited to work with this crew for the next eight months. We are so impressed with the servant hearts, love for worship, and God-given talent that are already apparent on this team.  May we please our God in all we do this year.

Chapel on 9.18.13

Hey all! Ms. Dorn here. Welcome to the OCHS chapel blog, where we detail our adventures in planning, leading, and experiencing worship! Our team is excited to give you an inside look at what we do in our classroom and in our worship services each week.

This week in chapel we looked at the first two verses of our school's theme for the year: Ephesians 2:8-10. As Mr. Dykhouse mentioned last week, he and I took on the task of planning our first few chapels for this year so our team would have time to get familiar with our planning process. Last week was his week to plan; this week was mine. Next week will be a joint effort, so stay tuned to hear all about what happens when two teachers have completely different ideas and have to put together a unified service without strangling each other... completely joking. :)

I will admit that I was a little stuck at first when thinking about how to dissect Ephesians 2:8-9. There's just so much good stuff in there - grace, faith, the relationship between salvation and works, God's gifts to us - how to fit it all into a 35-minute service?! I prayed over and read through this passage many, many times but kept coming back to the beauty in its simple message: we are sinners saved by God's grace and not by ourselves. What a freeing and humbling truth.

In this service we incorporated a few different styles of worship: worship through music, worship through listening to the Word, worship through congregational reading, worship through prayer, and worship through visual art. We opened with "All Who are Thirsty" written by Brenton Brown and then took some time to talk about God's grace and what it means for us. We then moved on to talk about faith and read through Hebrews 11 to get a clearer picture of faith. During our reading, we projected a show of art pieces depicting the various characters mentioned in that narrative.

We closed out our service with a time of prayer, thanking God for His plan for our salvation and asking Him to strengthen us in our faith. We sang one last song before we left - "From the Inside Out" by Joel Houston. This one continues to be a student favorite at OC and fit well as a response to the truths we had just heard.

After today's chapel I find myself feeling incredibly proud of our students. Not only am I proud of our committee members, who poured themselves into excellence in every detail of this chapel (light cues, punctuation in song lyrics, expressiveness in reading, musicianship), but I'm proud of the student body at OC for the way they worshipped. This is a group of young adults earnestly seeking God and I am so excited to see what He has in store for us at OC this year.

See below for full video.

O.C.H.S. Chapel on September 18, 2013 from Ontario Christian School on Vimeo.

Chapel on 9.11.13

Today, we had our first chapel of the year.  Ms. Dorn and I decided over the summer that we would plan and construct the first three chapels of the year.  We want to give the Chapel Team a chance to learn the planning process before they begin planning chapels.  So, this chapel it was my turn to plan.

The theme for this first chapel was "What is Worship?" We wanted to address the question, "Why do we come here in the middle of the day each Wednesday?  What's the point?"  So, our chapel was meant to model different forms of worship and give some direct responses to the aforementioned questions.  Hayley Thompson, a senior at OCHS, danced.  (She did this extremely well, I might add.)  Members of the Chapel Team led the singing and did the tech crew duties.  I gave a brief talk at the end.

 

The pictures are courtesy of the yearbook staff here at OCHS.

See below for the full video of this chapel.


O.C.H.S. Chapel on September 11, 2013 from Ontario Christian School on Vimeo.