PREPARATION
You will need: cardboard boxes, assorted craft materials and catalogues for the ‘Grand Designs’ activity, a large doll’s house and stickers or sticky notes for ‘In my home’.
GRAND DESIGNS
15 mins
As your young people arrive, invite them to use the cardboard boxes, art and craft materials and pictures out of the catalogues and magazines to create a room box of their ideal home. Encourage your group to think as creatively and imaginatively as they can, and not to limit their ideas by what they might be expected to have in their own homes now, or by any budget constraints. They may choose to focus on only one room (perhaps their dream bedroom now) or to design their own luxury mansion!
Invite each member of the group to exhibit their ‘ideal home’, perhaps awarding a small prize for the most creative ideas. As you look at each of the homes, talk about the ideas that young people have included and why these matter to them. What do they value most in a home? Why have they chosen to include some of these things? What is it that makes a home, ‘home’?
HOW TRUE FOR YOU?
5 mins
Gather your young people together in the centre of the room and mark a line along the floor from one side of the room to the other, with masking tape or a rope. Explain that this line marks a scale from ‘absolutely spot on, at one side of the room to ‘couldn’t be any less true!’ at the other. Explain that you will read a number of statements and, as you do so, the group needs to decide how true the statement is for them by standing at the appropriate point along the line. Depending upon the group, you will need to decide whether to probe a bit further and encourage discussion, or move quickly from one statement to the next. These statements could include:
• I enjoy spending time at home.
• My home reflects who I am.
• I would love to change things about my home.
• I feel close to God at home.
• It’s easy to follow God in my family.
BIBLE STUDY
10 mins
Provide Bibles or copies of Joshua 24:15b and ask the young people to read it. Explain that this is one very small, but well-known verse, which carries a great weight. In this short sentence, the writer proclaims how his family, household and community will live, even when others around him choose to live differently.
Arrange the young people into smaller groups and ask them to discuss:
• What does it mean to choose to ‘serve the Lord’?
• Can one person make a decision like this on behalf of their whole family or community?
• What happens if you are the only person in your family who chooses to follow God?
KEY POINT
Following God is not something reserved for life only in the public sphere; it also takes place in our own homes. For each of us that will mean something different, with different experiences and expectations.
IN MY EXPERIENCE
10 mins
Before the session, prepare a couple of your leaders to share a little of their own experience of God ‘at home’. Ideally, ask one leader who can share more about the way that they grew up in a Christian family and how that helped them to grow and develop in faith, and another who perhaps was the only Christian in their family, inviting them to share more about the challenges is raised for them as they were growing up.
Encourage your young people to ask their own questions of the two leaders, to help them think about what it means to grow up in a different family setting, how they can apply these ideas to their own home life, and how they can support their friends in their own family situation.
IN MY HOUSE
15 mins
Place a large doll’s house, with enough furniture included to clearly indicate which room is which, in the centre of the group. Provide a number of different stickers or shaped sticky notes, which can be used by the young people to indicate some of the following ideas by sticking their sticker in the appropriate room. For example, a star sticker in their favourite room in the house, a heart sticker where they feel closest to God, a blue sticker where they find it hard to see God and a red sticker where the most conflicts arise.
There are other ways you could use this activity, and may you wish to adapt the way you use the stickers depending upon the needs and experiences of your group.
As you work through this activity, use the stickers as an opportunity to discuss some of the issues raised, such as why we feel close to God in a particular place or what we can do if we don’t feel close to God at all. If conflicts arise in a certain place, how can we better bring peace to those situations? Talk about the way that each of us can bring God into our own families and homes, even if we are the only one in our family who has chosen to follow God.
KEY POINT
Our homes are not just places where we are nurtured and looked after. We also have the opportunity and responsibility to help create the environments in which we and our family live and take God with us when we go into our homes.
PRAYER
10 mins
As you bring the session to a close, remind your group that you, too, are a kind of family: a group of people that God has brought together to help one another grow. As part of this, we can pray for each other as we go back to our homes. You may wish to break into smaller groups to pray for one another, particularly with regards to some of the specific issues raised during this session. Pray that each of your young people will be salt and light in their own homes, making choices to ‘serve the Lord’ within their families.
