Vital Worship
Feature Stories ... for inspiration, learning, and group discussion
Community Worship at Mustard Seed School
“Who We Want to Be”: Linking community worship (school chapel) to life |
How can your Christian school design school chapel services that connect with real life? Mustard Seed School in Hoboken, New Jersey, has a model with following, one they call community worship.
No doubt second grade teachers elsewhere face the same challenge. Students eager to answer lean forward, strain one arm high, and wildly wave a hand. Too impatient to wait their turns, they butt in, interrupting classmates or the teacher.
You might expect a teacher of unruly youngsters to review polite manners or simply command the kids to zip their mouths. But when the second grade teacher at Mustard Seed School said, “This is a justice issue,” her students in Hoboken, New Jersey, knew what she was talking about.
That’s because justice was “a big-word theme” in what other Christian schools might call “chapel” but Mustard Seed calls “community worship.” Since it began in 1979, the urban school has intentionally planned daily worship that builds the community and flows through students’ and teachers’ lives.
The teacher asked the children how they could create a more just classroom, so that all members would have the time they need to speak. They decided to tally every time anyone interrupted. It was a class tally mark, with no names written on the board. Their goal was to decrease tally marks and have a more just classroom.
Community worship, not chapel
 A temporary hut during the autumn Sukkot (Feast of Tabernacles) helps students remember Israel's 40 years of wandering in the desert. |
The just classroom story comes from Shanna Pargellis, who helped found the school and is Lower School coordinator and curriculum coordinator. She says that when Mustard Seed began, they chose to use the term “school family,” rather than “chapel.” “We wanted children and parents who come to feel like they were part of a bigger family, the family of God,” Pargellis says.
They began to notice, however, that on the yearly application, some parents were listing Mustard Seed School as their family’s place of worship. “If you say school family, it gets very focused on the school. Community worship is a more transferable term. For children who don’t come from a family of faith, we wanted to lay the groundwork for them to continue the worship experience in a church,” Pargellis says.
As the school website explains, “Celebration and worship are woven into the fabric of day-to-day life at Mustard Seed. Students' life and learning are rooted in the richness of knowing that God loves them, understands them and that they belong to God. As God's children, they learn to know and care for God's world and God's people.”
Daily worship lasts about 20 minutes. The Lower School, kindergarten through third grade, meets for worship first thing in the morning. The Upper School, fourth through eighth grades, meets near lunchtime. Community worship includes everyone in song, prayer, Bible reading, and interactive messages meant to deepen faith and encourage community.
Several times a year, the entire school meets for celebrations, annual traditions based on Jewish feasts and Christian liturgical seasons. Pargellis says that when teachers ask alumni for Mustard Seed memories, they often comment on worship. “They’ll say, ‘Oh, I loved Pentecost’ or ‘Passover was a great thing.’ ”
Intentional structure
 Adding words or phrases card by card to a clothesline let students gradually memorize Micah 6:8 and understand the concept of justice. |
Mustard Seed’s community worship uses repetition to build a common visual and spoken language of faith. When children and adults gather for community worship, the time might begin with teaching a new song or celebrating a birthday. “But before we start our first song and our responsive reading, we light a Christ candle,” says Christine Metzger, the head of school.
Pargellis adds that lighting the candle shifts people “into a different mode—being reflective, listening, and being present to God.”
Worshipers focus on a section of Scripture, printed on a prayer card, for a month. “That’s one way to get the Word into the heart,” Pargellis says. From day to day, worship leaders change how they use the prayer card for responsive readings:
- A student reads a section and everyone responds.
- The group is divided into side A and side B.
- Only part of a passage is read on a given day.
- One verse gets repeated as a response, such as the Advent reading from Isaiah, to which worshipers respond: “A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a branch will bear fruit” (Isaiah 11:1).
Every monthly theme includes a visual. During the justice theme, community worship focused on Micah 6:8. “We had a clothesline up front and added a phrase or a word or two every day. We built the whole verse and memorized the verse, but we also took it apart.
“For our hospitality theme, we set a tablecloth with beautiful place settings. Every day, when we heard a story from Scripture about hospitality, we would put place cards on the table with the names of people we were learning about. Whoever was leading worship could look at the table and reflect and remind ourselves of earlier stories before,” Metzger says.
In the Lower School, teachers end each day with a classroom reflection meeting that ties back to that morning’s community worship. “They might repeat a song or Bible verse. There may be a question posed earlier that the teacher picks up on. They talk about what went on in the classroom that day—what was good, what was hard, struggles they had. The day ends with a prayer,” Pargellis says.
Upper School classrooms often do an early morning recollection of the previous day’s community worship.
Different voices
 Teachers take turns leading community worship. |
Visuals, prayer cards, monthly themes, and the Christian year provide structure for Mustard Seed community worship. There’s also plenty of room for individual voices.
Lower School teachers rotate turns for planning and leading worship for a week at a time. Upper School teachers work in pairs to do a week of worship and get paired with a different partner for later weeks.
Teachers choose community worship music to match the theme. “We sing some traditional hymns of faith because the texts are so rich and it’s part of the heritage of the church. We sing what we call world music and often sing in different languages. We have a worship leader in the Lower School who’s Cuban and a great guitarist so we’re singing a lot of contemporary music,” Pargellis says.
Besides asking students to lead responsive readings and play instruments, teachers plan interactive segments of community worship. They may involve students in drama, interview students, or alternate small group discussions with reporting back to the larger group.
“Who We Want to Be”: Linking community worship (school chapel) to life
Text by Joan Huyser-Honig
Photos courtesy of Mustard Seed School
Listen to July 2008 audio interview excerpts with Shanna Pargellis on:
- Making forgiveness part of the school language, 2:33.
- Helping children set character growth goals, 2:25.
- Inviting parents to attend community worship (school chapel), 4:16.
 When asked what they remember about Mustard Seed School, graduates often describe community celebrations. |
Read more about Mustard Seed School (MSS) and its origins. A teaching manual, Building the Shared Space, explains the school’s educational philosophy written by Deirdre Mingey, a former MSS teacher. This press release details the school’s annual Las Posadas celebration, open to the public.
Want to make your chapel worship more global? The Calvin Institute of Christian Worship offers many online resources for worldwide worship, including this page, where you can hear benedictions in many languages. You’ll also find ideas and tips for planning worship with children or worship with youth.
Browse related stories on disability and worship, faith formation, and using vertical habits to plan school chapel services.
START A DISCUSSION
Feel free to print and distribute these stories at your faculty, chapel committee, church education, or youth ministry meeting. These questions will get members talking:
- On a scale of “tacked-onto-school-schedules” to “woven into school life,” how do students and staff at your Christian school experience chapel?
- In what ways does your school’s chapel worship intersect with your students’ lives in the classroom, on the playground, or in their families, churches, or neighborhoods? Which ideas from these stories might you use to make a stronger connection?
- Talk among yourselves—and consult staff, alumni, and parents—about what has changed and what has stayed the same about chapel in your Christian school.
- How many students and staff are involved in planning and leading your school chapels? What changes do you dream of making along these lines? What prevents you from taking a first step toward change?
SHARE YOUR WISDOM
What is the best way you’ve found to improve chapel? Please write to us so we can identify trends and share your great ideas. Whether you do these or any other things, we’d love to learn what works for you:
- If you visited chapel services at area Christian schools, did you develop a template to help evaluate those visits and apply your findings to your own chapel worship? If so, would you share that with us?
- What has worked best—or not worked well—in your efforts to involve more students and staff in planning and leading chapels? As you compare these observations with your peers at other Christian schools, what common themes emerge?
- Can you share liturgical banner patterns, PowerPoint templates, or other visuals that help convey specific themes in your chapels?
This story was originally posted on August 15, 2008. External links were operative at the time the story was posted, but may have expired since then.
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This article was first published by the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship, http://www.calvin.edu/worship/stories/