The PACE senior team are leading assemblies in Elizabeth College, St Sampson’s High School and Ladies College this week on the theme of Advent. We look at different traditions from around the world. Did you know that in Japan, Christmas remains a novelty, with a few small secular traditions, such as, gift giving and light displays? However, a new, quirky “tradition” has emerged – a Christmas day feast from KFC! We then look at the importance of preparing for Christmas and take some time to reflect on the reason for the season, thinking about the tradition of advent wreaths and what the different candles stand for: Hope, Peace, Joy, Love and Jesus. To finish we play a video of the Nativity story.

We are very busy with our puppet assembly this week. Over the next few weeks we will be visiting all the primary schools on the island for our puppet assembly. Our puppet Oscar (the children’s favorite) will be talking about how he is preparing for Christmas. With the presenter and puppet Amy’s help he will reminded that the real reason for Christmas is Jesus. This week we will be visiting Hautes Capelles, Notre Dame, Castel, La Houguette, Blanchelande, Vale and Vauvert.

We are now in week 10 of our primary lunch clubs. This is the last teaching week and next week we will be having our party! We are looking at ‘We can be friends with God’. We ask the children ‘Why do you think God created the world?’ ‘Why did God send Jesus?’ ‘Why does God want us to pray?’

We have now covered 10 truths from the Bible, these are:

God created the world

God loves us

God made us special

God has plans for us

God hears and answers our prayers

God in three parts

Jesus came to do good

Jesus died for us

Jesus rose again

We can be friends with God

In September I visited the Prayer Spaces in Schools Day Conference in London. It was a fantastic opportunity to meet other people, hear their stories and share resources.

The day began with an overview of what had been happening over the last 12 months including some incredible figures:
In ten years, there have been 2800 prayer spaces events, that we know of, happen across the world with an estimated 1 million children experiencing them. This is incredible and so encouraging.

Izzie who is 16 shared her experience of prayer spaces in her school explaining how amazing it was and helpful for her as she settled into a new school. She talked about her initial response of “wow” as she walked into the room which had been transformed and how “it helped me to be myself”. She has now left that school to go on to college, but has returned to help out with a Prayer Space event and plans to do more in the future.

The morning continued with a chance to break into groups and talk to other people. We were able to discuss what we did, swap ideas, talk about what had gone well and what hadn’t. It was really interesting to hear other people’s ideas and stories from their experiences.

We were then introduced to the partnership with Christian Aid and had a sneak peak at the “Justice” themed activates which have now been released. These looked at understanding and praying for people around the world. We have already used one of these and hope to use more in the future.

Then Julian Stern, head of Education and Theology at York St John University, and his co-researcher Rachael Shillitoe introduced themselves and went through their Evaluation of Prayer Spaces in Schools: Interim Report. This is a report that they are doing, evaluating the contribution of Prayer Spaces in Schools to the spiritual development of young people. We all had a copy and they went through it, explaining how they’d interviewed children and staff in seven schools as well as using a questionnaire in 24 schools. This report was based on the initial analysis of some of these interviews and questionnaires.

The report goes into detail of what the responses revealed the children were getting out of prayer spaces and how it was helping their spiritual growth. It also looked at some of the controversies and issues that were raised by parents and from further research.

They then concluded that Prayer Spaces in Schools does contribute to the spiritual development of children and young people, however as this was an interim report there was a lot more further research to do and information to analyse.

After lunch we settled back in for a bit of a celebration. These conferences marked 10 years of Prayer Spaces in Schools. We watched a video where we got to see how widespread this movement is. There were flags from all around the world that we pinned around the church representing everywhere that had held prayer spaces (including Guernsey and Jersey). In total 31 countries have been involved.

I attended a workshop on Researching Prayer Spaces which was a conversation with Julian and Racheal. This brought up many interesting topics including how they conducted the interviews, worded the questions and the issues that arose from that. This was a great time to delve into the research more and discuss it further.

I came away from the conference with some great new ideas for activities which I will look into further as well as becoming more aware of the impact that this has on the children in our schools and the possibilities of the future.

We have some prayer spaces events coming up in our schools. If you would like to get involved and volunteer for an hour or two please email pace@cwgsy.net.

Please also visit www.prayerspacesinschools.com

Sarah

Photos from Sarah and Prayer Spaces in Schools

Last week the senior team were teaching year 7 students at Blanchelande College on the christian view of creation. The sessions started with the question ‘what came first the chicken or the egg?’ which led to interesting discussions about how the egg could have got there without the chicken or did the chicken evolve from dinosaurs! These lessons went well with the students interacting with lots of different activities centred around the creation story we read about in Genesis 1. It was a great opportunity to hear their thoughts on creation and be able to debate whether science and religion are compatible when it comes to thinking about the creation of a wonderful planet!

This week the senior team are visiting Ladies College for an assembly on Ecclesiastes 3:1 – ‘There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens’ where the team explore how all our emotions are important and have a part to play in our lives. Taking inspiration from the movie Inside Out – a film about a young girl dealing with big changes in her life, the film focuses on her different emotions and how they all need to work together to get her through the difficult time. We are also visiting Le Murier School for a session on the theme of advent and the time of preparation in the lead up to Christmas. Thinking about our own family traditions and what Christians see as important things to remember at this time of year.

This week we are in week 8 of our primary BOLT lunch clubs. We will be looking at the topic ‘Jesus died for us’. The children will be individually identifying something they are sorry about and we will be thinking about forgiveness. The memory verse challenge this week will be from John 3:16 ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life’.

The primary and secondary team are also continuing to prepare for new assemblies and prayer space events.

Hautes Capelles will be having their third Walk Through the Bible lesson this week.

We will also be doing our creation assembly at Blanchelande on Wednesday.

This week we have been continuing our creation assembly at Hautes Capelles, St Mary and St Michael, La Mare and La Houguette. We have now started week 7 of our BOLT lunchtime clubs. This week we are looking at the theme ‘Jesus came to do good’. This gives the children an overall picture of the work Jesus did during his time on Earth. They also have the opportunity to share with us what they know about Jesus. We have now tripled in number at our lunch club in Castel, which is fantastic! We would like to once again thank our volunteers who help lead these lunch clubs and the time and effort they regularly put into the clubs.

We have also been meeting to prepare for our upcoming secondary assembly, primary puppet assemblies and prayer space event which will be held near the end of term. Please pray for us in our planning and preparation.

Please also continue to pray for the Walk Through the Bible lessons as they begin session two.The secondary team will be teaching Creation to year 7s this week at Blanchelande. Please pray for great discussion and wisdom for the leaders in answering the students questions.

We are visiting Vale and Castel Primary Schools this week, continuing our Creation assemblies and starting a new course of Walk Through The Bible (OT Mini) at Hautes Capelles with Year 6.

Our primary school BOLT clubs are in Week 6 looking into ‘God in Three Parts’. There are some great discussions coming out of these sessions as well as a lot of fun!

We are also in St Sampson’s High School this week taking R.E. lessons. Our topic is the Christian views on evil and suffering. We are discussing the questions ‘where does evil come from?’ and ‘how should we to respond to suffering?’ The lessons have been going really well, the students are engaging in the activities and asking some good questions!

Please remember us in your prayers as we look at these topics, especially in light of recent events.

An exciting opportunity has arisen to join the PACE schools’ work team! 

If you’re interested in joining our team, have a look at the advertisement below and get in touch. We’d love to talk to you!

This week we are going to be continuing our assembly on Creation at Amherst, St Martins and Forest Primary schools. Above you can see Sarah and Chloe in action during an assembly last week.

We’re now going into week 5 in our BOLT clubs, focussing on how God hears and answers our prayers. We will be discussing how God might answer our prayers and why He might not always say yes straight away.

Last week in one of our BOLT clubs, we received some encouraging feedback from a teacher that was present. She fed back that one of the pupils who took part in the 1 to 1 challenge, normally finds it difficult to confidently complete an activity. However the teacher said that she felt proud that the child managed to complete the task easily. It was a great achievement for that child!

This week we have multiple lessons in La Mare High School and Blanchelande College on the subject, “Prejudice, Discrimination and Persecution”. Please pray that there will be some good discussion and conversation during these lessons.

Please continue to pray for the students that we interact with.

This week we are continuing our BOLT lunchtime clubs. We have more children attend each club now and we are currently on week 4. Each week we share a truth from the Bible. So far we have covered, God created the world, God loves us and God made us special. This week we are looking at ‘God has plans for us’ and what that actually means for the children. As well as playing games and doing activities based on this theme, we will be looking at the bible verse Jeremiah 29:11 “For I know the plans I have for you declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you a hope and a future.”

Please pray for our new assembly starting this week. We will be doing this assembly at Beechwood, Acorn House and Vauvert. The assembly is focusing on creation. We will be encouraging the children to look at creation as a gift from God and the importance of taking care of the world we live in. The assembly includes singing, illustrations, question and answer time and a video. We are hoping that all the students will enjoy this interactive assembly and learn an important lesson.