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.
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