(If you do this, then gardening is probably not for you)
We are trying to run a holiday club in half term. As part of that, I did the speaky bit at the Parade service at the Parish Church on Sunday. The passage was soundly exegeted via balloons, getting the congregation to do some Thom Yorke (Radiohead, dummy) dancing and holding a child upside down (don’t ask- it made sense at the time).
After that, as the service progressed, the group of boys, aged 6-7 in my Beaver Scout Troop gathered around to talk about the sermon. ‘You did this- why did you do it?’….. a pause…. then an explanation and a question back to them ‘does that make sense to you?’…then a pause and some further questions and a discussion. I was so lifted up and excited by the whole process.
In old language, that would be catechesis: teaching/ ‘instruction’. I guess they experienced much more than most at that service. And I wondered: where are the spaces(and the desire?) to do that for adults?
Still, these boys are naive and have no church background. They need to learn from us that the point is to have no questions and concommittent desire to learn and grow. They need to learn that any questioning is done internally and never shared with anyone else. They also need to learn that relating to each other as human beings in the sense of ‘I struggle with this’, ‘I am learning this’, ‘How can I do this’ or ‘This is just so fantastic!’ must be discouraged or at best kept out of church contexts.
Hmmm…