Bishop's letters: November 06 +Graham

Church Schools and the Future Community of Faith

Through our Church schools there is the opportunity for encouraging Christian faith, an opportunity which stretches out far wider in scope than the contact with the regular parish congregations. Where Church congregations are growing steadily older, then, for the church of the future in our villages, we must look to the Church School as a place where we can reach out to our children and young people.

Here are children who are glad to worship God and to pray. Hopefully they have parents who are willing to join with them. But when would be the best time for this and where should it take place?

Our Director of Education, Canon David Jenkins, and his colleagues, have been working hard to encourage School Heads both in the vision for teaching the groundwork of Christian Faith and in the leading of worship with vitality. Many good things are happening in our schools which we do not hear enough about.

As a diocese, we are committed to moving From Survival to Revival. God has given us this vision. So from where will the revival come? There is no doubt in my mind that it is in the Church Schools where we must look for the younger parents and families who will make up the community of Christian disciples in the years ahead.

Let us be imaginative in how to explore this rich resource. Might we start a ‘fresh expression’ of church on Saturday night (say 6pm) in the school hall? Or could the children prepare some drama or songs to offer in worship at the Sunday morning service on a regular basis, hopefully bringing their parents with them. Of course, the service would have to be in a style accessible to the children and the songs and hymns ones that they sing in school.

If the school children are to come on Sunday, it must, in part, be ‘their service’, with a style that they can relate to and call their own. This will call for a measure of sacrifice on the part of those in our congregations who like Sunday worship as they have always known it. But better some sacrifice now than no church congregation in twenty years time. We are long past the days when it can be expected that children will just accept a traditional liturgical service in the way that those in our church congregations did when they were young.

The contact between the parish and the school is vitally important. Stronger worship links between Church and school could be initiated by Head teachers, by clergy or by a lay person with a sense of vision. Maintaining links between school and parish is a responsibility which clergy can no longer shoulder on their own, particularly where they have several church schools in the benefice. I believe that there are lay people, waiting to be found, who have just the gifts to give short addresses in school assemblies, tell short stories, plan worship events or simply build up the links by being around at the school.

Regular school acts of Collective Worship and occasional school events in church achieve a lot. But if we are to develop in children and their parents the life of true Christian discipleship, it needs the commitment and the regularity of something more like a regular church congregation, perhaps at a new time in the week.

I am greatly encouraged by all that our Board of Education is doing and I have the sense that this is an avenue wide open for much more development.

+Graham, Bishop of Carlisle