Chapel and Statement of Faith

Weekly Chapel

As a part of our commitment to the formation of a whole person, we value the spiritual growth of our students. While all of our classes are taught with this mindset, Chapel is a time set aside every week for communal worship, which we believe is essential to the goal of spiritual formation. In Chapel, we aim to guide the affections of our students towards loving God and loving the things that God loves.

Our worship combines both ancient and contemporary traditions, music, and practices. The church calendar guides the focus of our worship as it leads us through the life of Christ each year: from the anticipation of Christ in Advent to the death and resurrection of Christ during Lent, Holy Week, and Eastertide. We also learn about saints and Christian heroes and heroines of the faith. Worship is not viewed as entertainment, focused on our needs or ourselves. Rather, it is a time and place to give honor and glory to God that, in turn, leads us toward the stewardship of God’s world and serving the needs of others.

Chapel is held one day a week and is divided into three age groups: Junior Kindergarten through Grammar 1, Grammar 2 through Grammar 6, and Logic 1 through Rhetoric 3. However, there are multiple times a year that we gather together as a whole school for worship. While parents are always welcome to join us in Chapel, participation in our school-wide services is especially encouraged. Those services are Convocation, Thanksgiving, Lent, Maundy Thursday, and Circling of the Green/Closing Ceremony.

Our Faith Statement

Live Oak’s educational mission is rooted in the tenets of historical Christianity and has been carefully crafted to emphasize the unity all Christians share in the essentials of our faith while respecting the diversity in faith and practice in matters considered non-essentials. We affirm together those doctrines commonly and historically confessed by the Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church, and the Protestant churches.

We believe in God almighty, maker of heaven and earth. Therefore, we approach all truth as edifying for those who believe in God, and we strive to understand every aspect of the world as part of God’s creation. We believe creation—including human thought and culture—is good, yet fallen from its proper relation to God.  Therefore, we approach the best of human culture as an expression of creation yearning to be reunited to God, and we recognize that our own understanding of God and creation is limited.

We believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, God’s only Son, one in being with the Father, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary.  We believe God acted decisively in history through Jesus, who suffered, died, was buried, and on the third day rose again, ascended to heaven, and who with the Father will come to judge humankind.  We believe that through Jesus Christ, God reconciled the world to himself by granting the remission of sin, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting. Therefore, the story of God’s saving work in history and promised consummation is essential to our understanding of the world.

We believe God continues to work in history through his Holy Spirit to restore the image of God in us. Therefore we trust in God’s indwelling presence to empower us to discern truth, excellence, and beauty, and to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly before God.

We believe Holy Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.

In response to the goodness and grace of the Triune God made manifest in creation, Christ, and the Holy Spirit, we develop our minds and our hearts that we may be good stewards of God’s creation and faithful bearers of Christ’s image in love and service to one another.