Where have all the Children gone?Martyn Payne |
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Encouraging Churches to work with Schools During my student days – yes , I can still just about remember them – one of my holiday jobs was working at Chester Zoo. No, I wasn't doing something daring or spectacular like feeding lions or washing elephants, in fact my time was usually divided between taking food round to the animal keepers and minding the car park! However there was one further aspect of the job, which turned out be rather prophetic. On more than one occasion I was left in charge of 'lost children', or at least of the office where they were brought. Children often became detached from their families on such exciting days out and it was my job to look after them until they were all happily reunited. I said this was prophetic of course because I ended up as a teacher for many years looking after other people's children in the classroom, and in more recent times I have been working with churches up and down the country who are also 'seeking lost children' and want help to be reunited with them again. Back in my zoo days it was the children who were brought to us and it was their parents who came looking for them, following a public announcement. Would that it were so simple for the Church today, which is looking for its 'lost children'. If your church group is now much smaller than it used to be many years ago – and by the way, this is true even in the bigger churches with a few notable exceptions – then you're not alone. However we cannot hang around in the 'lost children office' waiting for them to turn up. We must do the seeking and finding. This is one of the biggest challenges facing the Church in this new century. There is a lot of church-focussed navel-gazing about children by the faithful who bemoan their disappearance from churches. Church statistics on this issue can make grim reading, even though they are rather Sunday-focused and tend to ignore what is going on mid-week. However, rather than spending time disputing them, which can become a rather negative exercise, they should challenge us to rediscover the missionary spirit at the heart of our Church life. If the children aren't with us any more, where have they all gone? And when we discover where, what are we doing about going to where the children now are? In fact there is one very simple answer to this, which is staring us in the face. 99 per cent of these 'missing children' are of course in school – even in Church schools on our very doorsteps. It is therefore imperative that working with our local schools must be on the agenda of every local Church if we are to try and find a new way of passing on a living experience of Jesus to the children of today. We can't sit and wait at the 'lost person's office' for them to come to us. We have to go to them. Today church-school relations may not always be easy but the truth is that so very many of our schools were founded out of a concern for the nurture and education of children, which in turn sprang from a genuine Christian commitment. Today we have a National Curriculum for all our schools alongside which Religious Education is a Foundation subject that has to be taught. This includes learning about and learning from all faith traditions at every Key Stage, which means that children should be hearing about and exploring what Christians believe. The new National Framework proposed towards the end of last year has further strengthened this commitment to R.E.; so schools are being required to do something that churches are also longing to do. However I must add a note of caution at this point. Schools are places of educational professionalism where we as Christian visitors must earn respect if we want the opportunity to be involved with all this. Sadly good educational methodology is often way ahead in schools compared to some of the teaching that is still being done in churches. In my experience many times of collective worship in schools put to shame what we often expose children to in our all-together worship in churches. In schools children are encouraged to learn for themselves, discovering and growing through experiences rather than just being read stories and told what they mean. Children are encouraged in schools to question, to doubt and to discuss in groups not just told to accept and believe. This has led to a gulf between church and school. Both the neglect of our missionary calling as well as an ignorance of what is being taught and how children learn has often created a tension between church and school. Certainly many schools in the seventies and eighties reacted very strongly against Christian involvement, both because of the new and challenging inrush of other faith traditions that tended to steal the limelight but also because of bad experiences with some Christian groups who did visit schools. In some cases the hostility of some present-day heads and senior teachers from that era stems from the Church's failure to engage positively with all that was happening during those changing times. Fortunately in the nineties the tide turned and there are today a huge number of exciting initiatives up and running around the country. Schools and churches are re-engaging with one another. However it is also true that there is still ground to reclaim. There are lots of schools out there and as Christians we need to act with sensitivity, with good educational know-how, as well as believing prayer. There is no doubt that schools are open to receive visitors again. This country is in fact unique, certainly in the western world, in its inclusion of R.E. in the curriculum and this is an opportunity that we must neither abuse nor lose. Most schools, whether local authority or church, welcome community involvement. They value good input from local people, in collective worship, in lessons, in classroom support, in school management and its extra-curricular activities. The question is not ‘is your church involved with its local schools?’ but ‘why isn't it?’ Schools work must be seen as part of the work of a missionary Church. So where do we start to seek 'the lost children'? Partnerships between schools and churches do not happen overnight. They need to be worked at and built up with prayer and hard work. Churches themselves need to establish trained teams of people who know how to talk with children and share their faith in a non-directive and a open-ended way. After all, schools are not places where children gather voluntarily such as in church groups, so when we share our story there we have to respect these parameters. We need to keep informed about what is a happening in the world of school, both locally and nationally. There are bound to be some teachers among most congregations and, although we should not be further burdening them – in fact we should be supporting them as missionaries on our doorstep – nevertheless they will almost certainly be willing to lend their expertise, experience and know-how to help the church be informed about what best to offer a local school.
Please don't limit your ideas for making a contribution only to offering an assembly now and again, important though that ministry is. There is so much more! Here are just a few suggestions for ways in which local churches can work in and with schools: Does your Church pray regularly for the school's staff and its children? When holiday clubs and special days are run, are children from the schools informed and invited? Does your pastoral team include the school and its staff in its regular visiting? Is the Church being creative in how it welcomes school groups to visit its local building for R.E. and related topics? What about putting on something special to share the stories of the major Christian festivals? The Church has a rich heritage of music and art; are the schools being invited to share in that and then display any resulting work, or to celebrate it with a specific service? Does your local Church council or PCC report regularly on the work of the local school? Is the congregation encouraged to support local school events and are young people encouraged to consider teaching and other work with children as their Christian calling? Schools are always looking out for help in the classroom with reading and spelling. What about offering skills such as sports or music coaching? Maybe the Church itself is an ideal venue for large-scale school productions? And don't underestimate the key role of being a Christian parent among others in the playground before and after school or being the person on the school patrol crossing (who probably knows more about the children than anybody else!) Schools look for help on class outings or running clubs. It may be that after a while, once good relations are established, the school itself could be the focus for an informal midweek service or special church event. Schools often provide a second worship centre when new housing is some way from the Church. The list could go on and I am sure there are other ways of working together that you can think of or which are already happening in your local area. Barnabas Publishing and the Barnabas Ministry Team have had a commitment to such school and church partnerships for 10 years now. First expressed through producing books to help teach R.E. and bring the Bible alive within the curriculum, this now extends to providing special creative arts R.E. days involving drama, storytelling, music or even dance. Perhaps your church does not have enough people to get involved in schools in the ways suggested above. If so, then maybe one way forward for you would be to invite someone from the Barnabas Team and make a Barnabas Live day a gift to your local school – a number of individuals and churches have very done just that. Or perhaps you would like to make a gift of Barnabas books that are especially produced to support the teaching of R.E. in Primary Schools. If so, Barnabas can help put together such a package for your school. For more information about this particular way in which schools and churches can work in partnership do get in contact with Barnabas via enquiries@brf.org.uk or visit its dedicated schools website www.barnabasinschools.org.uk, where you will find further ideas for R.E. lessons and assemblies as well as how the books support R.E. syllabus guidelines. What next? Well, find out what is happening in your local schools – there should be an R.E. Co-ordinator for example in all primary schools – and also keep alert as to what is coming up in the forthcoming legislation. In fact this government is encouraging us to offer positive support to schools and the recent discussions about providing wrap-around care offer a whole new opportunity for positive engagement. For further details about this, visit the 4Children.org.uk website. Another avenue to investigate will be your own local education authority, which will have someone who looks after R.E. and there will also be a Diocesan Advisory Team, who look after Church schools in your area. Keep in touch with new guidelines that are coming out concerning collective worship – once again, on both our Barnabas churches and schools websites there are plenty of ideas of how to engage positively with the themes and topics that are often set for a week's assemblies. Talk at the school gate, talk with local teachers at church, and talk to the children themselves and to those in other churches who share this vision. And most importantly pray! This is how the doors are opened. It is no good simply to sit in our churches bemoaning the alleged fact that today's children are not properly hearing about the Christian message any more. Instead we should be praying that God will show us the right way to build bridges with schools so that good foundations about the story of Jesus can be laid in their lives. We want them to hear the truth of the gospel, not some vague bookish version. We want to show them that the Christian faith does make a difference to people's lives. We want the children to encounter Christ in us and not be short-changed with a second hand and incomplete version of our faith from the media and elsewhere. Schools work is truly mission work. We are called to step into our culture and explain our faith clearly, professionally and intelligibly. We mustn't let our children be confused by vague explanations or shoddy presentation. There is plenty of help available, resources and people to do training. Barnabas for one is committed to that. We know at least one place where all the children have gone – school – so we need to go there. We have an amazing opportunity through our schools in this country to do just that so let's not waste it. St. Paul's words to the Colossians are true for us today: Be sure to pray that God will make a way for us to spread his message and explain the mystery about Christ. Please pray that I will make the message as clear as possible. When you are with unbelievers always make good use of the time. Be pleasant and hold their interest when you speak the message. Choose your words carefully and be ready to give answers to anyone who asks questions. (Colossians 4: 2-6) I'm not sure whether or not the lost children office still exists at Chester Zoo. In some ways I hope not. However I am sure that the Church must abandon any idea of sitting in an office waiting for the lost children to come back to them. We need to get up and go and search for them; and working creatively with local schools is one very important way of doing just that. |
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