Vital Worship
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"Who We Want to Be": Linking community worship (school chapel) to life
Community Worship at Mustard Seed School |
Community is a key concept at Mustard Seed School in Hoboken, New Jersey—so much so that what other Christian schools might call “chapel” is called “community worship” at this interdenominational urban K-8 school.
 Shanna Pargellis, shown here leading worship, often talks about how Mustard Seed "has grown children from kindergarten." She also leads worship at The Nest, Mustard Seed's preschool. |
As each school year begins, daily community worship focuses on “who we want to be as a people and how our Christian faith influences our life together,” explains Shanna Pargellis. She helped found the school and coordinates its Lower School and curriculum.
She and Christine Metzger, the head of school, say community worship helps Mustard Seed students connect faith to the classroom, playground, and life in their families, churches, and the world beyond.
Growing in faith at school
Children get age-appropriate experiences in community. “Forgiveness is part of the language here. We teach children very early on that you say, ‘I’m sorry,’ and the other person’s responsibility is to say, ‘I forgive you,’ ” Pargellis says.
Community happens in specific settings, which is why Mustard Seed recently used the theme of place in community worship. Upper School students, in fourth through eighth grades, usually sit together by class. During the place month, each student sat by kids from other grades. The leader would read Scripture related to place and have students interact.
“One day a leader read a passage about a place of refuge. She shared a place that was a refuge for her. She had students spend five minutes jotting down thoughts about places of refuge where they meet God.
“We gave them a few minutes to quickly share their place of refuge in small groups of three students from different age groups. We brought students back together and the leader asked people to share places—not something they’d written down but what they’d heard somebody else say,” Metzger says.
Students mentioned meeting God in school, the art room, at church, and in bedrooms. They shared freely because, as Pargellis notes, older kids often don’t want to focus on themselves.
 Community worship often focuses on "big word themes," such as justice, integrity, or hospitality. |
Metzger says teachers “are very mindful in how to hook students on the worship topic.” Teachers often use props from classrooms, perhaps kindergarteners’ clothespin doll self-portraits or a towel or toy donated for a school service project. Teachers may ask students to re-enact a playground incident.
“We’ve used a student planner as the year begins to talk about how new it looks and how the year ahead is like a fresh slate. At the end of the school year, a community worship leader might borrow a student’s planner that’s a little beaten and has been used quite well. He’ll talk about how many pages are left and how far we’ve come.
“Our community prayers always include something for our school, a concern in our country or world, and prayers for people we care about who need prayer for their mind, body, or spirit. We end with the Lord’s Prayer,” Metzger says.
Families welcome
 Parents are welcome to attend daily community worship. |
As do many Christian schools, Mustard Seed draws students and teachers from a range of churches. Some families choose the school more for its educational philosophy than its faith stance.
“We have families who do not come from a faith background. We’re very clear with them in the interview about how we claim what’s central to us—Christ and the Bible. We expect every family to come to a community worship time so they can experience fully that we pray in the name of Jesus. We read from the Bible. We sing our faith together. These are expectations for every student, not something you can be exempted from,” Pargellis says.
Family members are always welcome at community worship, and often up to 25 parents attend.
When Lower School students, kindergarten through third grade, focused on place, they looked at places in the Bible where people encountered God.
“We built up to the key truth that God is always with us wherever we are, whether it’s in a pig sty or, like Jonah, on a boat. We came back to the idea of place at the end of the year to ask how our sense of worship place had changed,” Pargellis says.
Teachers from various backgrounds talked about where they worshiped as children. They interviewed parents from different churches. An Egyptian parent from a Coptic Orthodox church brought icons and other worship materials. Parents read the benediction from Numbers 6 (“The Lord bless you and keep you…”) in their native language.
“We heard it in Chinese and Spanish and all sorts of languages,” Metzger says. “It let us bring diversity of faith into the school and yet use the key thing that holds us together, the Bible,” Pargellis adds.
Church and community synergy
 Through its memorable Las Posadas celebration, Mustard Seed shares the Christmas story with urban residents. |
Prayers and service projects link Mustard Seed community worship to the world beyond their walls. The sharing goes both ways between the school and metro Jersey/New York City community.
Mustard Seed’s annual Las Posadas celebration, based on a Mexican Christmas tradition, re-enacts Mary and Joseph’s trip to Bethlehem. Costumes, candles, and a mariachi band draw Hoboken residents outdoors in winter to a city park.
Because community worship at Mustard Seed is so child-centered, staff members rarely invite local pastors to give the message. “Instead of putting them on the spot and saying, ‘You’ve got 10 minutes to fill,’ we engage pastors in a conversation or interview. We set it up so they know their role. Often they bring something from their church,” Metzger says.
Local clergy do lead worship at staff meetings before and after the school year, during which every student is prayed for by name. “A staff member works alongside them, but they bring in their own liturgy and lead from their own tradition. It exposes us to different expressions of Christian tradition, which is helpful,” Pargellis says.
Metzger says that lighting a Christ candle and singing the alleluia before Scripture reading are community worship traditions imported from nearby churches.
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/