Worship Resources
Sharing ideas for what has worked and what might work in our chapel services.
Across our schools in Aotearoa New Zealand and Polynesia, we hold more than 100 chapel services a week, 40 weeks a year. That’s at least 4000 creative, age-appropriate service ideas being generated every year just by our group of schools. It makes sense to share them with each other, for all our sakes! This page has been set up so that anything from single, seed ideas to full liturgies can be sent into the Schools’ Office, in any form from rough notes to detailed instructions or powerpoints, and we will put them up in a usable fashion for others to share.
Candlemas
Fr Richard Peers suggests ways in which our apparently common human response to candles can be drawn into our annual celebration of Candlemas. He provides an outline for a service suitable for schools, complete with suggested sung response. Find the full blog post here. Richard writes: Prayer or reflection corners are nearly universal in church…
Stations of the Cross
Because Stations of the Cross traditionally involve moving around, it may not be the first thing we think of for a chapel service. But Teresa (Cathedral Grammar) enjoyed doing it in a primary school chapel last year, and has recommended a resource you can find here. The potential for Stations in schools is huge! Ask…
Signs and Symbols
In our document, “A Whole Community”, which attempts to give some guidelines as to what makes an Anglican school “Anglican”, the 7th mark is “Signs and Symbols”. Expanding on that, we say: Anyone entering our school, or reviewing its online presence, will know that we are a Christian school which places a high value on…
Ash Wednesday
One of the strengths of the Anglican Church is that it has never lost its awareness of the power of using ritual and the full range of our senses in worship. Ash Wednesday is a good example of this. Watching last year’s palm crosses burning to make this year’s ashes; connecting ashes with our own…
Tiny Advent Poems
These are 24 “tiny poems” of 3-5 lines each, set on a photo or illustration and perfect for putting up on a powerpoint. Each poem suggests a way of understanding what Advent is. Some examples: Since we are not at school right up to Christmas, using one each day for 24 days would mean starting…
Te Rangimarie
With the proliferation of commercial Christmas jingles in our shops, it’s good to have some home-grown and thoughtful Christmas songs to use in chapel. Here’s one written by Josh Jones the Christmas after the Christchurch mosque shootings, pointing towards the hope and peace promised by Christmas. Here’s what he has to say about it: “The…
What are we waiting for?
We all know that even something as straightforward as Christmas can be hard to explain to our students in Christian terms. Since Advent is much less familiar for them, that can make it both harder and easier for them to understand. It’s a new term for most, so they’re learning from scratch, but it is…
Praying Set Prayers
One of the distinctive things about Anglican liturgies is that we repeat responses and prayers from one service to the next. Praying at all is foreign to many of our students but even those who are from another denomination may find this practice strange. In this video, the Archbishop of Canterbury tells a story of…
Alternative Great Thanksgiving Prayers
Bosco has various alternative thanksgiving prayers up on his “Liturgy” website (which is always worth having a look at). This link takes you to one written in simplified language and with only one response, which is used more often than the regular responses (thus, hopefully, keeping their minds more engaged!). Does anyone else have (authorised)…
Ian: The puzzle of inclusion
This is a powerful short animated film, more powerful because there are no words. It explores what it means to include another, and what it means to move into their world rather than expecting them to conform to yours. It’s probably better for secondary than primary, but could be the basis for some profound conversations….
