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.