I’m Colin Bowden, Minister at Burgh Baptist Church in Lincolnshire, and I have the privilege of heading up our Schools Team that undertakes Corporate Worship in Burgh Primary School.
Worship was curtailed during the first lockdown but in conjunction with the Head Teacher Mr Hurdman, we worked out a plan to reintroduce Worship into the school when they returned in September. This comprised with the Head Teachers help, streaming the worship into each of the class rooms, whilst having one year group in the hall with us.
The overall plan was a Video (We have used Relive videos and are currently showing episodes of The Miracle Maker). We then link this into a Bible story, and found interactive stories work very well, then we have a worship song from the Doug Horley collection, because his songs are signed using British Sign Language, as we are not allowed to sing. This works perfectly and the children love it. We play the same song for 4 weeks to enable the children to build up the signing.
On this Third Lockdown, we are still going into school, live streaming from an empty hall this time, into the class rooms, but now we have families/children logging on from home at 9am in the morning. This currently is around 70 but rising each week, so now not only are we reaching children in school with the gospel we are going into homes as well, which is a first for us.
Yes, there is a lot of technology involved, but God has answered our prayers with a Head teacher with the nous to do it, and a team willing to carry on, because we feel its important to give children something normal even if it is zany worship.Just before Christmas we held a Missing Sheep hunt where children had to find the names of small knitted sheep hidden in shop windows as well as discovering answers to questions about the Christmas Story. (Shop keepers and business owners love being involved). We do this every year and it is normally contained in about 90 minutes, but this year we spread it out over 4 hours, 10am – 2pm, which allowed us to talk to parents, as they came in to the church to collect the sheets to take part. The Parents were so grateful that we were doing something normal for the children.
We also zoomed making a Christingle for kids and adults as well as putting it on our website, and had a lot of views.
I pray this will encourage your church to keep being involved with your local school or reinventing your children’s ministry.
Colin
Revd. Colin Bowden
Burgh Baptist Church
www.burghbaptistcommunitychurch.org.uk