Chapel Preaching Series: Ingredients for the Good Life

The dinner table conversation went something like this:

Me: “Kids, I’m stuck for ideas for our prep school chapel series next term. What should we do?”

My 11 year old son, George, with wild eyes: “Cooking!”

Me: “What?”

George: “We should do a series on cooking! And cook stuff in chapel!”

Me, shaking my head in confusion: “George, we can’t bring in stoves and microwaves. Most things take too long to cook. And besides all that, I just can’t see how cooking has anything to do with God.”

Penelope (my wife): “You should call the series, ‘Ingredients for the Good Life’

The problem with outside-the-box creative ideas like this is that they tend to stick in your head. So our Term 1 Preparatory School chapel series, indeed became ‘Ingredients for the Good Life’. As expected, it was one of the most wild and memorable series we have ever done.

Of course, an Anglican chaplain should be somewhat hesitant to veer away from the lectionary when designing chapel services. The lectionary is a beautifully constructed calendar that gives us a whole new and spiritual sense of time in a world divided into work and weekends, terms and holidays. The lectionary tells us of a spiritual order of the world built on the story of good news. There have been times when I’ve indeed used the lectionary through our prep chapels, and I continue to use it with other school chapels.

But there is also another Anglican tradition that sees something beneficial in a cohesive themed preaching series. And I find these work particularly well for the young ones. ‘Ingredients for the Good Life’ was one such series. We had four prep chapels this term and this is what we did:

Chapel 1: The Fruit of the Spirit. We made fruit salad together. The homily demonstrated that there are ‘good fruits’ for a fruit salad, such as watermelon, apples, berries and bananas. And there are definitely not good fruits – e.g. eggplant, tomatoes, and chillies. I attempted to put these bad fruits into the fruit salad only to be prevented by my chapel captains. We made the point that God has set up life to work best when we live with certain fruits: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness and self-control. And it definitely does not work well when we live with anger, revenge and hatred.

Chapel 2: Unity. We made smoothies. I attempted to make a smoothie by placing all the ingredients in a glass without blending them. The captains tasted and said it just tasted of milk. Once they brought out a blender, and we blended it, they said it tasted amazing. The point we were making was that community is not just a collection of individuals, but individuals living together in unity. We riffed on Paul’s body analogy in 1 Corinthians.

Chapel 3: Patience and Self-Control: We made homemade Yo-Chi. As I was trying to construct this my captains were refusing to wait and eating the frozen yoghurt before it was topped. Then they snatched the toppings from me and fought over them. I made the point that you need patience and self-control for life to really work.

Chapel 4: Love & Easter. My chapel captains ran this one by themselves. They decided to make scrambled eggs. But one of the captains took control and was strangely calling it ‘scrabbled eggs’. He insisted to the other captain that he knew what he was doing. He threw whole eggs into a bowl, shell and all. Then added a packet of wooden scrabble pieces. Then handed a rolling pin to the other captain to whisk. They both agreed it was a failure. They pointed out that the missing element was love. The careless captain didn’t care to find out how to make scrambled eggs, he confused his words, didn’t separate the eggs, had the wrong implements and didn’t cook it. They then moved to thinking about a different kind of egg – Easter Eggs. And how the story of Jesus dying and rising is a story of God’s profound love for the world.

I believe that part of the Chaplain’s role in a school is to both teach and philosophically ground the school’s moral values. This series was an attempt to do this and we drew links to the story of Christ at each point.

It was a wild but very memorable series. My prayer is that the students finish the term remembering the joy and fun of chapel, as well as the message that the ingredients we add to our lives really matter, because God is the Master Chef of life.

The rest of the year? Term 2 is ‘Monsters, Mayhem and the Goodness of God’, Term 3 is ‘Classic Shorts: What we can learn from the Internet’s Funniest Moments’ and Term 4 is ‘If Feelings were People’.

Nick is very happy to share his chapel resources so please be in touch with the editor if this is of interest.