Explore Together - The Journey E-Book

Lee Herdman

• Herausgeber: Scripture Union
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 141

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Explore Together is a new and practical tool for helping people to engage with the Bible. It encourages the exploration of the Bible using natural learning preferences and preferred spiritual styles. At its heart is a desire to see people hear from God and learn more of his love for them. It works with big groups, small groups, mixed-age groups, single-age groups, older people, young people, children, families, house groups, church congregations, small groups, youth groups, school groups… in fact Explore Together can be used in any environment with any group dynamic.

Leseprobe

The Journey

Hearing from God and learning from each other

Leanne Semans Smith & Lee Herdman

Copyright © Scripture Union

First published 2015

ISBN 9781785062421 (ePub edition)

This e-book edition published 2015.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of Scripture Union.

Scripture quotations are taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION, © 2011 by Biblica, formerly International Bible Society. Used by permission of Hodder & Stoughton, a division of Hodder Headline Ltd. All rights reserved.

The right of Lianne Semans Smith and Lee Herdman to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data: a catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library.

Cover design and internal layout by Jake Howe.

Scripture Union is an international Christian charity working with churches in more than 130 countries.

Thank you for purchasing this resource. Any profits from this book support SU in England and Wales to bring the good news of Jesus Christ to children, young people and families and to enable them to meet God through the Bible and prayer.

Find out more about our work and how you can get involved at:

www.scriptureunion.org.uk (England and Wales)

www.suscotland.org.uk (Scotland)

www.suni.co.uk (Northern Ireland)

www.scriptureunion.org (USA)

www.su.org.au (Australia)

In memory of my lovely dad Norman Semans who, along with my mum May, has shown me what it means to have a steadfast faith in God that can weather the storms of life and bloom vibrantly in blue skies and grey.

Lianne

To my parents, who have provided all the tools I need to forge my own adventures in life and faith.

Lee

Acknowledgements

The Explore Together journey has been an exciting one but never has it been a solitary desktop endeavour. It was born out of practice, developed from questions asked and challenges faced. Throughout the journey there have been many people who have contributed to its development, sometimes without even knowing. It is to those people that we want to offer our thanks. To great thinkers like John H Westerhoff II, James Fowler, Rebecca Nye and Jerome Berryman who have opened our minds to new ways of thinking. To the many children who have taught us far more than we could ever have taught you, and to the amazing teams we have worked with over the years who have willingly and patiently supported and encouraged our desire to do things differently and push the boundaries.

Our practical thanks goes to Darren Hill, Terry Clutterham and Alan Charter for recognising the potential of Explore Together and for encouraging and enabling us to share it with you.

Lee expresses thanks to his church families down the years who fanned into flame his faith and love for God. ‘I might not have known God if you had not reached, taught and nurtured me.’

Lianne wants to express special thanks to Phoebe and Jacob. ‘You have taught me so much about so many things, being your mum has given me wings. Thank you for always believing in me.’

Finally, to our families and friends, thank you for your love and support.

‘Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.’ Ephesians 3:20,21

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Chapter 1 Journeying together

Chapter 2 The challenges of being together

Chapter 3 Exploring together

Chapter 4 The benefits of exploring together

Chapter 5 The practicalities

Chapter 6 FAQs

Bibliography

Recommended reading

Foreword

‘How can I use the Bible to reach out beyond the church?’, ‘How can I get our church members actually to relate to each other? To be a real community across the different age groups?’, ‘How can I get young people to join in?’, ‘How can I encourage Christians to grow stronger in their faith?’, ‘How will they ever gain an appetite for the Bible?’, ‘How can I find out what gifts people have?’, ‘How can I help people be more confident in talking about their faith?’

Two words: Explore Together.

‘When two or three of you are together because of me, you can be sure that I’ll be there,’ said Jesus (Matthew 18:20, The Message). That’s what makes Explore Together so compelling and so life-changing – the presence of God himself at work in and among people of any age, background, understanding and style, as they listen for him to speak with them through the Bible. No one truly experiences that and stays the same.

Last year my wife Sue and I used Explore Together at the Scripture Union holiday we run for families. In a field by a stream in a forest, everyone sleeps in log cabins, enjoying the fresh, clean, outdoor life.

There, parents and children play and try new things together, far away from the usual pressures and routines. And there they also explore the Bible and have the opportunity to respond to it, individually, in families and all together, many of them not used to doing so before they arrived.

For Explore Together times, everyone – 7-year-olds to 70s – came together as we set the scene for the Bible passage and picked up on the big questions for our Bible exploration. They set off individually, or with family or friends, to one or more of the ET zones. When they returned, they gathered first with their families to share what they had done and learnt, and then with the full group as we waited to hear what God had been saying.

Everyone hushed to listen. In response to the Bible, someone had created fabulous art; a young child had prayed; a teenager had chatted with a group about the issues in her life that the verses touched on; a 70-year-old had written a beautiful poem. You could have heard a pin drop. Every item was applauded; all contributions were valued; we saw how everything helped us. People carried on talking about the contributions throughout the day as God continued to work among us.

Whenever I have experienced Explore Together, the same things have struck me – whether with a bunch of families on a holiday, or at Spring Harvest with hundreds of children and leaders, or with team members together at a conference, or with a group of young people in a regular weekly session.

Explore Together takes everyone seriously, whatever their age, as people who can explore the Bible in their own way and hear from God, who understand the importance and the potential of what they’re doing and who know that, by telling others what they discover, everyone can be helped to grow stronger in their faith.

Somehow people recognise Explore Together as a big, very special, very spiritual moment.

So I fully endorse Explore Together as a simple but inspiring way to build up God’s people – and those to whom they seek to reach out – through the Bible and prayer. I hope and pray that you will have the biggest, boldest adventures with it. Maybe you’ll use Explore Together in contexts where at first you doubt it will ever work, but then you’ll recall how God has always stepped in before and made the occasions so much more than you ever dreamed of. And you’ll give it a try anyway. God is faithful, and he will be there among you.

Terry Clutterham

January 2015

Introduction

Have you ever had a real light-bulb moment? That exciting point in time where everything falls into place and makes perfect sense. Explore Together is the result of one such moment for us. Well, actually, it was more of a gradual turning on of a light bulb using a dimmer switch process; let me explain.

It all began in 2006. Lee and I were having one of our many ‘putting the world to rights’ conversations during a coffee break at a conference that we were attending together as fellow children’s ministry practitioners and friends. We have known each other for many years, working together on children’s camps and other events.

At that time Lee was employed by the Salvation Army as the children’s officer for the central south of England, and I was working in a voluntary capacity as a children’s worker in a local church. I was also a full-time mum and had taken the opportunity to engage in studying for a degree in children’s and youth work. Both Lee and I have a background in education: I trained as a nursery nurse and worked in early years and Lee trained and worked as a primary school teacher and a leading teacher within the local authority.

Between us we had clocked a total of 40 years’ experience of working with children in a professional and voluntary capacity.

Lee and I would often talk to each other about the difficulties and challenges we faced in our ministries, and we would also share our triumphs and successes. Between us we had most of the theoretical bases covered. We had a solid grasp of theory and practice around child development and learning. We understood the significance of the works of Piaget, Bruner, Skinner, Vygotsky and Gardner.

We had heard and even trained others on much of the theory around faith development and spiritual formation. We were well versed in the works of Fowler, Westerhoff and Nye. We were like sponges, buying every book and attending every seminar and conference that could possibly help us to be the best children’s practitioners we could be. We were desperate to see the children and young people that we worked with grow in their faith, love the Bible and become committed followers of Jesus.

Although we were both seeing some great things happening in our ministries, we were very aware that we were only catching a tiny glimpse of the treasure God wanted to share with us. The possibilities and potential were driving us to want more for our young people!

It was Albert Einstein who defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Lee and I had, over the years, introduced different elements into our programmes – great creative prayer opportunities, funky action songs with fun dance moves, interactive storytelling experiences, DVD clips, live bands, flags and ribbons – but the reality was we were still working within the same structure that we had worked with for years.

Lee talks about that time as being a time of huge frustration. He could see the increasing progress children were making in school by introducing small changes to his practice; he had seen for himself the power of personalisation, choice and children ‘owning their learning’. On one hand he could see the potency of such elements in his teaching, but felt unable to apply them in a children’s ministry setting. Children’s work in church was still very didactic, generic and managed by the leaders.

What we both offered in our ministry was still very much a one-size-fits-all approach. The epiphany moment came to us when we seriously asked ourselves the questions: What would our children’s ministry look like if we put all of the theories that we had spent years studying into practice? What would happen if we applied in church the excellent practice we had employed in our work with children outside of a children’s ministry context?

I said earlier that our light-bulb moment was more like the turning up of a dimmer switch. This was the point that we turned that switch.

We began to work through our challenges and apply the theories to them. These included:

• managing groups with wide age ranges• catering for groups of varying sizes• managing difficult and challenging behaviour• catering for a range of learning preferences and learning needs• supporting parents within the church to recognise their responsibility for nurturing faith in their children.

What we discovered wasn’t ground-breaking, in fact, it was comforting in its simplicity.

It didn’t require us to do much more than create a safe environment where God’s voice could be heard, and to step back and trust him to speak.

As Explore Together began to emerge we quickly saw the impact that it had on our groups. It encouraged:

• community building• Bible engagement• faith formation• growth in discipleship• inclusivity.

We recognised that God had given us a gift and we wanted to share it.

In 2009 we introduced Explore Together to the 8 to 11s children’s programme at Spring Harvest. By this time, Lee had returned to teaching and I had taken up a full-time position with Scripture Union as a church and community development worker. The children’s programme at Spring Harvest was part of my role.

Lee and I knew that Explore Together worked well within a small group setting, it had been tried and tested and we trusted the theories enough to introduce it to this programme. So, with 450 8- to 11-year-olds and a team of 60 volunteers, we set off.

On the first night, we presented the Bible story and sent the children off to explore the questions in the different zones that we had prepared. We knew that it could work brilliantly, but we were slightly nervous that it could also end in chaos so, with a contingency plan up our sleeves, the two of us went back stage to pray. Let’s just say, we didn’t need to use our contingency plan. The power of the Holy Spirit moved in that chilly venue every night that week as the children and the team heard from God and learned from each other. The results were powerful and inspiring, with many children and team members feeding back at the end of the week that Explore Together had been their highlight. Team members went away itching to introduce it into their own children’s programmes. The light bulb was getting brighter, but the brightest moment was yet to come.

All-age worship was beginning to feature quite prominently in my local church ministry and also in my role with Scripture Union. I would quite often be asked to lead all-age services at my church, and in my Scripture Union capacity I was often asked to run training sessions on ‘How to lead all-age services’. In fact, the all-age sessions at conferences almost always attracted the most delegates.

I knew that the volunteers we had worked with at Spring Harvest had really engaged with Explore Together alongside the children, many experiencing profound encounters with God both directly and through the things that the children had shared. With this in mind, I began to use Explore Together in all-age settings. I quickly realised that the theories that we put into practice within our children’s programmes were theories that applied to every age and stage of our faith formation. Explore Together really did release intergenerational communities to discover the Bible together at the same time, in the same place and it was truly beautiful.

The light-bulb moment? Well, that came when we embraced Jesus’ words, ‘… unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven’ (Matthew 18:3). Explore Together works because it helps us to rediscover what children haven’t lost yet: elements that enable them to connect with God in ways that some of us have grown out of.

Elements like awe, wonder, creative exploration and interdependency.

In her book The Seed and the Soil, Pauline Hoggarth stresses the importance of the word ‘creative’, stating that ‘the church needs to take seriously the fact that people learn in different ways, and adapt its approaches accordingly’.1She suggests that, ‘there needs to be a continuum between our Bible engagement approaches with younger generation and with adults … engaging with God’s word as adults often becomes too focused on analytical, propositional thinking and ignores the intuitive and imaginative aspects of the person.’2

By placing children at the centre of our thinking, studying how they learn, develop and grow in their faith, Lee and I were able to reconnect to the very heart of who we are. We are children of God, dependent on a continued and close relationship with our heavenly Father, created in his image, connected to each other as brothers and sisters, dependent on each other for growth. We are all one in Jesus Christ (Galatians 3:28).

We would both now find it hard to plan any event for children, young people or adults, churched or unchurched, that did not include an opportunity to explore together. Lee has continued to develop Explore Together within the context of the school where he is deputy head teacher, and I have used it in a multitude of settings, including sessions for teenagers and adult house groups.