New Thoughts in Newbury

Lucy Moore

OK, so I shouldn't be surprised by the things children come out with, but several classes in the nursery and infants' school this day had me literally open-mouthed with the connections the children made.

We'd begun the day with an assembly on Zacchaeus and carried on in the sessions to explore Jesus' habit of bringing in the outsider, caring for other people. I'd prepared a simple visual of a group of people in a circle, with one person standing far away from the group, and was intending to use it to talk about how it feels to be the outsider. No sooner had I set out the isolated person than one child said, 'That's the story you told us this morning.' Well, yes.

And just as we were looking at it again with another class after exploring the story of the man with leprosy, a child said, 'You're wearing a cross. That's what Jesus died on.' Which led us inevitably into a discussion about how Jesus didn't just want to bring people back together, he wanted to bring people back to God. Deep theology for four-year-olds?

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