Gearing up for Sympo 09

Thursday begins the three-day marathon that is Calvin Symposium on Worship and I’m quite busy this year. On Thursday I will welcome about 150 high school students, teachers and principals from all over North America to spend much of the day talking about Christian High School chapel – a topic that is not often given this sort of intense attention. I’m pretty excited about it and, fortunately, I have my friends and colleagues helping me out. Ron Rienstra will talk about Worship Basics, Sharon Veltema and Jack Postma from Unity Christian High School in Hudsonville, MI, will talk about their program. Cindy DeJong and Paul Ryan from the Calvin Chapel program will talk about what they’ve learned leading chapel with college students, the Calvin Worship Apprentices (including my daughter Meredith) will lead the high school kids in workshops around some of the nuts and bolts of leading worship – using the arts, music and speaking. Finally, I’ll talk about Faith Nurture and how chapel relates to that and we’ll have some time to hear from some of the other participants.

Before the workshop begins I’ll play guitar for worship in a band lead by Greg Scheer. Then on Friday and Saturday I’ll lead a seminar on why and how we can use Psalms with kids. Whew. But even with all this I hope to attend a bunch of seminars by other folks and I always leave excited to have been present and to have been able to participate.