Cliff

Hey :) It's the school holidays! We've kicked them off by going to a local festival in the Peak District and we'll be ending them by going to an even more local festival down the road from me :) I guess I'll write about the one we have just been to rather than the one we're yet to go to though eh..!

So the one in the Peaks is called Cliff Fest. It's hosted by a bible college (Cliff College) where I recently did a course in children's ministry. I really like the children's work (run by Scripture Union) they do at the festival so one of the main reasons I wanted to go was so I could sit in on that and observe what they do and how they do it and how my boys respond to it. 

They use a similar approach to something I developed at my church by applying play therapy principles to children's ministry. I've been on quite a journey with children's ministry since my eldest was a babe in arms ten years ago when I googled something along the lines of 'child led  Sunday school'* because I felt there was a chasm in church resources and approaches in this area, and I discovered 'Godly Play' which, while imperfect as with all things (but adaptable), is exactly that philosophy. Around the same time I became aware of Forest Schools which have that same approach only outdoors and without the Christian bit. I've since trained both as a Godly Play practitioner and a Forest Schools assistant. The way SU run the kids work at Cliff Fest (and at Minehead's Spring Harvest) is this sort of approach. Though there are hundreds of kids there, having lots of fun, it has the most gentle, pastoral environment I've seen in such large scale kids work. It's quite an achievement. Every child is known.

My particular interest in children's work is boys and special needs - especially invisible ones (special needs not boys!) - because I find that if these needs are met everyone's a winner , and I also feel that behaviour is often a symptom of an unmet need and that the onus is on us as adults to cater for these children - the right provision = happy children :) At Awesome (the name of the Cliff Fest kids work) there is lots of slap stick (leaders being slimed, children throwing shaving foam pies in leaders faces etc), audience participation, whole-group games, small group outdoor games using loads of gross motor skills, hands-on freeflow activities such as Lego, play dough, etc, workshops such as puppetry...and, interestingly, my boys' favourite part was the bedtime story :) 

In addition, there's not too much singing, and much of the singing that does happen is reflective with everyone sitting down, perhaps with the sign language to watch on the screens. There's creative story telling based on a bible passage, small group discussion (for literally 5 mins, and more like optional show and tell) and a special time of whole-group feedback where random children that want to can share in a roving mic something they've made or done or written etc and what they were thinking about while they were doing it. They all really listened during this time because it was kept moving and it was children speaking to children about what they felt God was saying to them. This helps give a sense of anything God may have been doing corporately, e.g. a lot of children were worried about the Manchester attacks so the leader was able to pick up on this and help affirm the concern and also touch on what the bible says about fear and worry and how we can turn that into action e.g. give our worries to God. 

Anyone who didn't know what God was saying and had done something random was encouraged that sometimes God doesn't answer straight away - many adults also have things they've been waiting even for years to hear God on - his timing is different to ours and we just need to keep hanging out with him in the meantime so don't be discouraged if you haven't felt God speak yet. This was really helpful for me to hear because I've been acutely aware of that issue with children, not wanting them to feel silence = rejection or anything else negative, but unsure of how to approach it. I also encourage them that God loves us just spending time with him whether there are words spoken or not - like a mummy cuddling her baby. There's also a short prayer time where children can share prayer needs in their small groups.

As you will have gathered, the masses are divided into small groups (of about 8) so get to know each other and their group leaders, and those leaders are given free time to go with the flow of their group for most activities (labyrinth prayers, acts of service, craft etc) so if their group is loving the outdoor games there's no pressure for them to move onto something else. Forest school would call this going with the flow of your group. So if there is an energy lull, or things are getting too hyped, that can be a prompt for the group leader to redirect. I love this affirmation of community-building and of valuing people as they are - I believe it's how church should be (and often is) :) 

This post hasn't been written in running order format but as a splurge that gives the general idea! The approach is all very well thought through and I remember finding it so encouraging (through originally learning of Godly Play to doing the more wide-reaching training with Cliff College) to discover that what I was doing on a small scale in my little Sunday school, actually has credibility! It just felt right and made sense to me but it turns out there are books about child led children's ministry, with theological reasoning and everything! Hopefully it's becoming more mainstream :) I wasn't going to write about this but it is what has come out and I don't want the post to be any longer so I'll leave it there for now!

*It goes without saying that when I say 'child led' I don't mean 'not God led' - what I mean is the adults are tuned-in facilitators/mentors rather than directive downloaders