Communion for kids
Just finished preparing tomorrow’s simplified Communion service for the primary school. Once a year at Easter, the top class (10-11 year-olds) experience a Communion. Probably the only Communion some of them will ever see. Any children who are confirmed receive the bread and wine, as do any school governors, staff and random visitors.
This year there are no confirmed children, so I’ll give them all a wafer but they don’t get to taste the wine, much to their disgust.
This little service has changed so much in the ten years I’ve been here. Ten years ago, the children had a Passover on the previous afternoon, then I went in the following morning to show them the links between Passover and Communion. There were always some confirmed children and plenty of staff and governors attended.
Now there are rarely any confirmed children, there’s no Passover and very few staff or governors turn up. Those staff that are present have little idea of what’s going on.
I talk the children through the service and try to explain the links with Passover as well as the symbolism of the Communion, but it’s become harder and harder over the years. There’s not much clue about any of it these days – and this is a Church of England school.
Oh well. It’ll be interesting to see what transpires tomorrow. According to today’s paper, the businesses of tomorrow will be ‘spiritual’ (by which they mean will be concerned about workers’ well being) so maybe there’s still hope!
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April 2nd, 2009 at 3:38 pm
Maybe its the National Curriculum and the emphasis on SATs in the core subjects e.g. English, Maths and Science. Nofolk seems to have done badly at Key Stage 2. It was in the EDP today. However all this improving on results all the time seems a little short-sighted to me as one is not comparing the same group of kids!! Oh well I suppose that is bureaucracy! They don’t seem to realise that or more to the point that children are not commodities, they are people with all the variations that that entails.