Music: This is me

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INTRODUCTION

With its recent release to DVD, the movie of the year continues to strike a chord with all ages and its songs feature in the charts week after week. This song sees the characters stand up against the persecution they have faced because of their differences. This session uses the lyrics of that song to explore what it means to be welcomed by Jesus.

As your young people arrive, give each person a playing card, ensuring that three suits are distributed evenly. Give out only one card from the fourth suit, ensuring that you choose a confident player for this card. On the signal to begin, challenge the young people to find everyone else in their ‘team’, and watch what happens as they realise one player is all on their own, excluded from the rest of the group. Ask them how they feel to be alone and explain that you will be looking at this theme during the session.

Provide Bibles and ask the group to look together at Mark 2:13-17.

Ask them:

• How do you think Levi and his friends felt before Jesus came to his house?
• How do you think Jesus made them feel?
• What do you think the crowd would have thought when they saw Jesus spending time with them?

LISTEN AND DISCUSS

Introduce the song, providing copies of the lyrics for the group to follow. After you have played it through once, ask the group to imagine that Levi and his friends were the ones singing this song. How could they relate to the lyrics about hiding away? How did Jesus help them “find a place”?

Explain to the group that this song focuses on the singers finding strength and confidence inside themselves to find their place “marching on to the beat I drum”. Challenge the young people to consider how this is different from Levi and his friends, who found their place together with Jesus. What does this mean for us today? What does it mean for us to find a place together with Jesus? Whose drum beat do we march to? How can we welcome and include others in that party? Remind your group that Levi and his friends became outcasts because of something they had done, the way they carried out their business, but many people find themselves on the outside through no fault of their own.

As you draw the discussion to a close, sit down together and light a candle. Invite the young people to think about those people or groups of people who currently find themselves hidden away in the darkness. Spend some time in prayer together, either silently or inviting the young people to pray aloud for those people they know who we could find ways to invite into the light and spend time with, as Jesus did.