Mel's Blog Post- Hub Assignment 2
Updated: Jan 24, 2020
During the first training day I was able to watch how the FiS team shared their faith with the children in the lesson. This came in different ways whether through the main teaching sections, or when they were working with the groups and were sometimes able to share parts of their own personal testimony. The openness I witnessed to hearing about Christianity from the children was something that really surprised me as they were obviously all from different faith backgrounds themselves but they were willing to hear about what Christianity is. Another thing that surprised me was the level of engagement the team had with the children during the lesson. The idea of having 4 members of team in a single lesson seemed like too many to have, but the way they used the team was very clever. The experience for me opened opportunities to be able to approach schools with an option to deliver RS lessons as well as the standard CU or Prayer Space. Seeing how the team were able to hit the RS curriculum points, whilst still maintaining an accurate view of what Christianity really is, opened up pathways in my mind to be able to try and emulate that in my own context. The lesson also showed me a different way of engaging the 95 in things we do in schools which would be interesting to see how it would work in my local area. A challenge I could see with the way the lessons ran was if some volunteers were not committed then that could disrupt the way the lesson went, especially the group activities as you would not be able to have a volunteer per table steering the conversation. Overall though, the training day provided me with a lot of food for though especially as to whether it was religious education or evangelism. I’m still unsure as to where I think this type of work stands as I definitely think it was good quality religious education and could potentially be seen as evangelism in some aspects, but in my opinion a key part of evangelism is the death and resurrection of Jesus. This leaves me unsure of whether lessons like this are evangelism.
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I agree with your point about evangelism and the death and resurrection of Jesus, in isolation any 1 lesson that doesn't 'point to the cross' like all good preaching (or worship songs?) do can seem to be therefore reduce to morals, religious practices and attitudes etc... however, when delivered as part of a curriculum you then have the opportunity to recap and plenary the gospel story with each visit several times a year, and year on year. The long term 'drip-drip' evangelistic approach - if that's even a thing!
Thank you for your post, I enjoyed reading your reflections. Your comment about the necessity of the death and resurrection of Jesus for something to be considered evangelism was thought provoking. I guess if you define evangelism as something that leads people to Christ, you must have the death and resurrection so any other lessons could be seen as laying the groundwork for this evangelistic message. Definitely something i'll have to think more about.
Thanks, Mel, for sharing your experiences but also thinking already about ways forward in your own work. I agree that more Christians with a heart for C &YP should give RE/RS a fresh look as it can be a real win-win to reach the 95, at least a solid start to get you in the same room!
You raise an interesting point about the risks of working with volunteers - their commitment - for example. At FIS we find it useful to run an induction session where we run through what they/we expect as well as bringing them along to see a session before they 'sign up'. This can be 121 or once you've got a small group interested. It…