N-Gage the children
Diocese of York conference on working with children in a Christian context.
This was held at Wydale Hall in early September and, I’ve only just gotten round to posting it up here!
Sorry!
Report on the:
N-Gage with the Children
conference run by
York Diocese 4th – 6th September 2009 at Wydale Hall
This was a weekend seminar looking at how we as a church and those responsible for the spiritual growth and development of Children and Young People (C&YP), ensure that they are engaged and nurtured by the Gospel and are challenged by the message of Christ in society today.
The seminar was built around the “Fully Alive In God”[2] initiative and was delivered through a series of workshops and discussions aimed at exploring and expanding our own views of children and youth work.
The seminar had a good mix of both residential and one-day attendees covering a wide age-range from 20 to 60! Those of us who were residential had a greater opportunity to network and engage with each other throughout the weekend.
The Friday evening was spent exploring our own childhood, looking back and re-connecting with what it meant to us to be children, our memories and our hopes and dreams as young people. We spent some time in smaller groups discussing this and exploring our memories (if any) of church and worship in our early years. This was a great way to consider our own “refined” understanding of childhood, our lost connection with what it means to be a child and, the eyes we used to have and, for a lot of people this was a difficult but really helpful start to the weekend
Both Saturday and Sunday were taken up with a range of workshops covering areas such as “Engaging with schools”, “Childhood Today”, “Creative Prayer”, “Social justice” and “Listening to children’s voices” to name but a few. The most eye-opening and challenging points to come out of the workshops centred around our perceptions of children and their spiritual life, traditional v evolved teaching and children in the church today.
To try to sum up the seminar in one single report is most difficult however the main points that arose out of the weekend for me in relation to our church were:
- C&YP are not “Unfinished Christians” – they are complete and whole spiritual people as they are. Our role is to guide and teach, but also to learn from them about what it means to be young in today’s world. Imposing our worldviews or perspectives stifles their own explorative urge.
- C&YP seek to be ACTIVELY involved in leading and receiving worship, and our role in this is to facilitate creativity, learning and development, not simply to “teach” them to become “adult Christians”.
- C&YP should be ENCOURGED to challenge and question doctrine, Biblical teaching and church tradition. We need to be prepared to answer and allow them to EXPLORE their feelings in relation to The Bible and God. Disagreeing with perceptions and received truth and exploring WHY they disagree is as important as ACCEPTING truth, and helps embed truth within.
- We need to accept and work with the fact that we as adults do not know ALL the truth.
- God speaks to all of us, no matter how old or young we are.
- Let the C&YP speak as part of our community of faith, how DO we engage with them about the life of our church?
- As a church we need to reach out/go out to C&YP, bringing them into our worship life to help make the connection between childhood and adulthood.
- We need to be prepared to change the way WE worship to accommodate our young people, we need to be willing to explain our traditions and allow them to be challenged, changed and shaped so they may become the traditions of their church as well.
- C&YP within our church are not the future of the church they ARE the church. As a congregation we need to recognize and adapt to meet this implied challenge.
- C&YP want to be a valued and valuable PART of our community, not a specific sub-set, set apart and specially managed. They need to be engaged with the WHOLE church as often as possible either by serving or BEING SERVED. We need to SHOW them that they matter to both God AND us.
- We need to create and implement a strategy to engage with, teach, learn from and jointly develop with the young people in our church and our community.
I also heard some interesting sound-bites over the weekend…
- “Conversation is better than indoctrination”
- “God is bigger than our doubts or fears”
- “Understanding is fluid, but it IS built on truth”
- ”Saying ‘I don’t know’ shows a far deeper understanding of self”
- “Create a living faith by not killing the inquisitive nature”
- “Children are part of EVERYONE’S ministry, not just the youth team/worker”
- “Can children be HEARD in your church? Can they speak?”
- “What do you pass on to your young people when they worship at your church?”
Make of those what you will but I believe the gauntlet has been thrown down, and that we as a church need to move with purpose, vision and faith to meet that challenge. It also raised some serious challenges to us as a congregation in the way we interface with our young people, how we connect and serve THEM and how we allow them to serve us.
The weekend gave me a whole range of ideas and insights that will be of great use in developing the relationship between our church and our school. It will help me further understand how we can enliven and develop the spiritual journey of the young people we are blessed to have in our congregation.
Resources:
- Diocesan Children’s Work (http://www.dioceseofyork.org.uk/index_youth.shtml)
- Fully Alive In God (http://www.dioceseofyork.org.uk/files/content_youth2-3.pdf)