Not Just Another School Service


I've spent a good deal of this week doing things with the local secondary school. Last term, the deputy head who deals with worship and I decided that to try and fit the whole school into the church for a service at the start of term wouldn't work. So we concocted a plan to do a service a house (about 200 students) at a time.

As the summer drew to an end, we found we had to create a service. So we did.

The theme was hope and along the way we also tried to use the church in a different and more interesting way. So at one stage we sent the students to four different parts of the church to do different things. In one place they watched a video. In another they wrote one of their hopes on a luggage tag and hung it from string. the effect was spectacular, the forest of hope grew over the course of the day. And the head of music wrote a new song especially for the service.



I did a session on praying using pictures. After doing the same meditation 20 times over the past two days I'm a bit tired, but it was great fun. And the response has been very encouraging. One teacher asked his tutor group to vote on old or new style of service. The new style won 23 to 3. He also said that it was the first time he could remember being in church and not having to discipline students, so he'd been able to enjoy the service himself.



The only thing now is having to follow it ...

Comments

Anonymous said…
heya! i was at that service, my dad reads your blog thingy! yea i thought it was a gd service, all my friends thought it was pretty gd compared to the usual ones... the only complaint was that we missed the whole school coming together. cos thats lots of fun! anyways... ta for dooing it x
9:46 pm
charity said…
wow, this looks fabulous! You are possibly the cleverest anglican i know.
9:57 pm
Phil C said…
The luggage tags are great - reminds me a lot of forests of prayer flags which snake across Buddhist village squares in North India. Stunning.
6:50 pm
Anonymous said…
headline" Alternative worship meets mainstream education, gaining popular acclaim", now to get the kids to greenbelt!
10:06 am
Tracey Wheeler said…
We had good reports of this service from our 12-year-old, who much preferred it to the stand-up-sit-down way of doing things. Her only criticism was not being able to visit the stations in her own time and in the order she chose - I gather there was some necessary 'shepherding' in order to process 200 kids at a time in a short time span. Still, she was far more positive about this service than the Greenbelt labyrinth, which she reckoned was too similar to the ladies loo Q we'd just done (you know...all file along, not talking; sit down for a minute when you get to the centre; then all file out again!) So alt worship for kids does work, you just have to taylor it carefully...(sorry!)
10:16 am
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Prayers for Evensong

The BBC were at the Cathedral yesterday, recording our Choral Evensong . I wrote some new prayers for the occasion, which I share here: In the evening of the day, we come to you, O God, bringing those we have met, for your blessing, our hurts for your healing, our sins for your forgiveness, our labours as our offering and our lives as our worship; we come to you through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, who became like us, that we might become like him. Amen. Lord Jesus, you call us into your church; help us to leave behind the things we cling to, coax us with the treasure of heaven, and in the age to come, when the first will be last and the last will be first, allow us simply to be found within your Kingdom, and to feast at your table, where there is abundant life for all your world, for with you all things are possible, and in your name we pray. Amen. God of all hope, may the light of your justice search out the darkness of our world; may the power of your love banish al...
Read more

Theology and the Man in Black

Image
I went to hear a paper at the University this evening entitled 'The Apocalypse according to Johnny Cash: Examining the 'Effect' of the book of Revelation on a contemporary apocalyptic writer'. As well as some fine music and lots of humour from YouTube , the paper was examining how we detect the effect of the Bible on the world, and using Cash's The Man Comes Around as a means of doing this. One of the papers themes was that because Cash doesn't name Jesus as the Man (who comes around) he has a weak Christology and leaves his work open to a range of interpretations of who 'The Man' could be - from Cash himself to George W. Bush! Lots of food for thought about how what we say is then heard and repeated in our culture, which has little understanding of the Gospel. But the thing that really stood out for me was the suggestion that it was possible to tell that Cash was really reading the Bible in this song (rather than just regurgitating what his traditio...
Read more

Faith and Struggle on Smokey Mountain: The Michael Ramsey Prize 2016 Shortlist 1

Image
Review of Benigno P. Beltran, Faith and Struggle on Smokey Mountain: Hope for a Planet in Peril (Orbis, 2012). If all the books on the Michael Ramsey Prize shortlist are as good as this, then I’m in for a treat!   It is good to have an author on the shortlist who is not from the UK or the US.   Beltran is from the Philippines.   A Roman Catholic priest, and a teacher of theology, Beltran has also been the chaplain to the most notorious rubbish dump in the world – Smokey Mountain in Manilla.   Here around 25 000 people lived as scavengers, and became a symbol of both poverty and the ecological degradation of the world. This is a deceptively short book.   It is both moving and challenging.   It also covers several different genres.   Most obviously, it is autobiographical.   Benigno Beltran was a Pilipino priest who was sent to study in Rome.   He returned to the Philippines to train seminarians.   On h...
Read more