Bristol Diocese training weekend (February 3rd-5th 2006)Lucy Moore |
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Worship with children present 1 What is worship all about? When we look at the images of God and the corresponding images of worship, we see that in worship we ALL need:
2 Why do we want to be all-age? It’s a good Biblical principle:
If being a Christian is being a member of a family, we need to learn to live with and learn from all members of the family. We aren’t complete without them. We have a limb missing. We are not whole. (We might be comfier, but since when did Christians seek a comfy life?) It’s more inclusive / helpful to think of division being between different learning preferences and different stages on the faith journey, rather than adults / children.
Learning is not just cognitive. Worship is more than just teaching. But having said that we’re all different, children as a subset are a good example of a ‘voiceless’ minority: adults can assume authority over them so we do. If a fifty year old churchwarden said that a service was boring, we would be shocked and take notice. If a child did it, what would we do? Relationships must underpin what we do on a Sunday. We need to learn to be all-age communities, not expect to be able to run all-age worship in a vacuum. We need to listen to all (including children) and value all (including children) What might it mean practically in your church to i) listen to everyone, including children and ii) value everyone, including children? ‘Both children and adults find some of church boring and irrelevant. Children show their boredom. Adults hide it.’ What can each group learn from the other? What happens when we dare assume that children have the same claim on the space, ritual, style, and content of worship as do the adults? 3 The service itself Needs to belong to all styles of learners, to be more than just cognitive teaching, to be an experience that involves the whole person, body, mind, spirit, emotions. More is learned through non-verbal messages than through words. 8 touchstones for each component part of the service:
Drama and storytelling Ideas See the Ideas page under Art and Drama and Bible stories, themes and characters The Zacchaeus story and Mrs Littlebottom were taken from The Gospels Unplugged |
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