Each week at South City Community School, our school community gathers for chapel.
Students, teachers, faculty, and parents come together in The Journey sanctuary for a time of singing, teaching, and worship. Sometimes we hear from a guest speaker or member of our faculty. Other weeks, a classroom takes the lead, with students sharing a thoughtful and creative presentation connected to our yearly chapel theme.
Chapel is one of the ways we live out something central to who we are as South City Community School: community.
Why Chapel Matters
SCCS is a school where Christian faith informs the life of our community and all that we do. Motivated by our faith commitments, our faculty and staff share a desire to serve families in the City of St. Louis through a beautiful education that honors every child as a person made in the image of God.
As a missional school, we seek to be an inclusive blessing to our surrounding neighborhoods. The majority of our families are Christian, while we also welcome families from a variety of faith and non-faith backgrounds.
Chapel is one expression of that community life.
It gives us a regular opportunity to pause from the rhythms of classrooms, assignments, activities, and busy school days and gather together. We sing together. We listen together. We learn together. We consider what Scripture teaches us about God and how we are called to live.
And perhaps most importantly, we do it together.
Themes of Chapel
Each year, our chapel theme gives our community a shared framework for exploring Scripture together.
Last year, our theme was “The ABCs of God.” Each week, students learned about an attribute of God corresponding to a letter of the alphabet.
From A to Z, students explored truths about God’s character, giving them language to describe who God is and opportunities to consider what those truths mean in their own lives.
We also created a simple resource for families featuring all of the attributes from the year—a great printout for a bulletin board, classroom, or family refrigerator.
This Year: The Psalms
This year, we are turning our attention to one of the Bible’s oldest and most beloved collections of songs and prayers: The Psalms.
Why the Psalms? Because they teach us so much about the Christian life. Throughout the year, we’ll focus especially on two themes: what the Psalms teach us about the character of God and how they teach us to pray.
The Psalms teach us about the character of God.
The Psalms are filled with beautiful descriptions of who God is.
As students encounter these passages, we want them to build a rich and lasting understanding of God’s character. The Psalms give us words to remember who God is: strong, faithful, wise, good, and our refuge.
The Psalms teach us how to pray.
The Psalms also give us a model for bringing our whole lives before God. They show us that we can pray when we’re joyful, afraid, angry, confused, or waiting.
Psalm 73 reminds us that we can pray when we’re angry, while Psalm 62 reminds us that we can pray while we wait.
The Psalms give children words for honest prayer—and a model they can carry with them for a lifetime.
When Students Become the Teachers
One of the special things about chapel at SCCS is that students aren’t simply sitting in the audience.
When a classroom presents at chapel, teachers work with students to prepare a thoughtful and creative presentation connected to our yearly theme. This might include a song, reading, dramatic presentation, artwork, or another creative way of communicating what students have been learning.
There is something powerful about watching students teach their peers.
They are learning not only to understand ideas, but to communicate them, listen to others, and contribute to the life of their community.
A Songbook for Life
Our hope for chapel this year is bigger than simply introducing students to the Psalms.
We hope students grow to love them.
We want them to recognize the Psalms as a songbook of God’s people—a collection of words they can return to throughout their lives.
When they don’t know what to pray, the Psalms can give them words. When they are joyful, hurting, waiting, questioning, or worshiping, the Psalms can meet them there.
Our prayer is that years from now, our students will still remember the Psalms they encountered at SCCS—not simply because they learned them in chapel, but because those words became part of how they understand God and how they talk to Him.
Bringing Chapel Home
This year’s chapel theme is inspired by The Lord Saves Me: 40 Christ-Centered Family Devotions from the Psalms by Iain M. Duguid.
The devotional introduces children to selected Psalms through child-friendly translations, short readings, and prayers, giving families an opportunity to explore the Psalms together at home.
Learn more about Iain M. Duguid’s resources
We love the opportunity for what students encounter at chapel to continue beyond the sanctuary and into their homes. Chapel can become a starting point for family conversations, Scripture reading, prayer, and worship throughout the week.
A Community That Gathers
At its heart, chapel is about gathering.
We believe beautiful education happens in community. Each week, chapel gives us an opportunity to step out of our individual classrooms and remember that we belong to something bigger than ourselves.
As we journey through the Psalms together this year, our prayer is simple:
May our students grow to know God more deeply, love His Word more fully, and discover in the Psalms a songbook for praise and a model for prayer that they will carry with them for the rest of their lives.