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Ben Dykhouse teaches computer applications and church history at Ontario Christian High School in Ontario, California. He also co-teaches a daily chapel class for the school’s weekly chapel worship. In this edited conversation he talks about a chapel planning model that focuses on glorifying God together.
Christian high school students, staff, and teachers at Calvin Symposium on Worship 2012 began a chapel planning seminar seated around tables. They introduced themselves and described common questions in their school’s chapel planning process. One person at each table summarized responses to share with the entire seminar.
More and more churches are using technology in their sanctuaries, and the music minister is usually the person who is responsible for overseeing its use and installment. This course starts with acoustics, mixing boards and microphones. These are the basics everyone will encounter in their churches. Understanding the foundations of these areas helps future music ministers make wise decisions even as specific technologies change with time.
This is a guideline for a course on Music Ministry Practicum, where the students are paired with mentors and meet with the professor to discuss their experiences.
Hannah Huisman is a senior at Unity Christian High School in Hudsonville, Michigan. As a member of the school’s spiritual life committee, she helps plan and lead chapels. In the edited conversation below, she explains how teens at her church, Immanuel Christian Reformed Church, have begun planning and leading one worship service per month.
How well do your Christian high school chapels, liturgies, or all-school worship times help students grow in faith? Are your staff and faculty planning chapels for or with students?
This syllabus is for a course that thoroughly covers hymns, and studies the more philosophical aspects of liturgy.
This course was shaped to mirror the way that a music minister experiences his or her involvement with the church, from searching for a job to the nuts and bolts of the ministry to leaving a position. Each step along the way the students completed projects that dealt with a different area of ministry.
This syllabus follows the outline of the required text, focusing on the movements of worship and spirituality in the various paradigms – the ancient, medieval, Reformation, and modern. Special attention is given to the cultural context of each paradigm and the impact of culture on the worship and spirituality of the period.
The course that follows this syllabus would introduce the students to the interdisciplinary field known as liturgical studies. The course would explore liturgical history, liturgical theology, the place of ritual in the life of faith, as well as the application of a praxis-theory-praxis model to liturgical issues.
This course prepares students to design and lead worship services in a variety of contexts. Building on a foundation of establishing a philosophical framework in which to design and implement worship, specific elements and design forms or structures will be presented, experienced, analyzed and evaluated against the philosophical framework.
This course guided by this syllabus would explore the notion that worship and spirituality correspond with Christian truth. The Scripture and common creeds of the early church are studied to reveal the overarching Christian narrative of creation, incarnation and re-creation. Worship and spirituality are understood within this context, the meta-narrative of faith, commonly known as the Christian world view.
