Church reflected: 4 schools in one day

One of the joys of working where I do is that there are five primary schools on my patch. Today I spent time with four of them. Today I caught a glimpse of what church communities can be like at their best.

Communal life in Christ: we are many, but one body....

The day started with midweek Holy Communion which takes place on market day in a market town. Years 5 and 6 formed more than half of the congregation of thirty-odd. There is always a real sense of community about this service with worshippers of all ages being present and taking part in the service, some as servers, or giving contributions to the sermon, and everyone sharing a handshake of peace across the generations. I always get the sense that this service is something the regulars - whether pupils or adults from the wider community - really cherish.

Then it was on to take collective worship in a school tucked away down a beautiful side valley. I arrived to find them still finishing their annual Christmas Dinner, so I had to shorten what I'd planned so a group of them could go off on the coach to swimming lessons on time. But we chatted about Advent and how its themes help us think about Christmas being just one important part of God's Great Big Story. Again, the welcome from the pupils is always a delight, and it didn't really matter that we had a shorter time together: what we did do together was put the fun of the Christmas dinner they'd just had into some kind of bigger picture, and for me and for them this was a welcome pause for breath in the middle of a busy day.

On next to another village school, this time meeting in a village hall for their Christmas production. Reception and Key Stage 1 (that's "infants" in old money) staged a nativity play with great panache (and occasional prompts and prods). Then the older pupils performed a dance and then a song (the latter being something I'd helped them learn on my weekly visits to help in class). It was great to be with this school as an audience member for once. Normally when I see them, it is either me leading collective worship, or helping in their classrooms, but this time it was them giving to me. And it was ace.

Thankfully, a cuppa was available before I sped off to yet another village for an after-school Messy Church session. Here, members of the village's Methodist and Anglican churches (lay and clergy alike) worked alongside the children in craft activities, making different elements of the nativity, chatting round the tables about how the characters fitted into the story, and eventually joining together to tell the Christmas story in a cardboard theatre resembling a Punch and Judy tent.

And God pointed to the classroom carpet and said unto Abraham,
"Look at the carpet and count the number of bits of glitter, if indeed
you can count them..." (see Gen. 15:5 - a good Advent I reading!)

I was part of the team who were decorating the theatre itself with glitter, stamp prints of nativity characters, glitter stars, paint, glitter, stickers, stars, glitter, glue, glitter tape and glittery stickers. And glitter. There were loads of adults there which was great - a ratio of around one adult for every two children - so there was a lot of inter-generational helping each other and explaining, and not just grown-ups telling the children what to do. Church is at its best when it refuses to be merely clubs of the likeminded but genuinely breaks down social barriers, and this was all-age church in action. We were a team, with an idea of what the big plan for the afternoon was, but with a lot of giving each other space to do our own thing, try different ways of doing things, and enjoying each other's company as we all made it happen together and learned from each other.

So in one day:

• children joined with me and others around the Lord's Table in worship, to spend time meeting Jesus in Word and Sacrament
• children and I shared a reflective time together, a restful pause in a busy day for all of us
• children served their community through creative communication
• children and adults got covered in glitter, glue and paint, engaged with an important story in the Christian faith, and made something good co-operatively
• these things grew out of the schools to become something bigger, reaching out into a wider vision of community
• the children's contribution was valuable and valued; they gave and received; they were affirmed and they affirmed others

Sounds like what Church could be, to me.

Today reminded me that when people talk about British values, they are still really talking about Christian values. Not in the moralistic way which the term "Christian values" is used from time to time; rather that the communal values I saw in four C of E schools today are grounded in models of Christian communal living which we read about in the New Testament. No society is value-neutral. No society exists which is not "belief-based": whatever values we use to base consensus on are underpinned by faith in something or other every time.

Not every parent would be comfortable with their child participating in every element of my day. I get that and respect that, but no child was forced to take part in any of it, and the atmosphere was not one of indoctrination, but of sharing and celebrating together things which underpin our national culture, and which inform our society's values. Or at the very least, these things give us a starting point for a discussion about how those values need working through into practice.

Church of England schools were founded to serve their communities rather than to be places of indoctrination, or cosy clubs for church "insiders". Today I saw living proof that this foundation is being lived up to now, at least in rural North Yorkshire. I think we all enjoyed ourselves today, and I reckon there are many churches who can learn a lot about what it means to be a loving Christian community from their schools.