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.