How we work with girls and boys and how we can create environments in which they thrive is an important issue for us to get right. It’s essential that we keep thinking and developing and seeking out ways to strengthen our understanding of what we are doing.
This leads me to Ian White’s article on children’s work training, and whether we are training the children’s workers the Church needs. A couple of weeks ago I received back from the markers the third paper for my masters. I passed (hooray!) - so I’m still going and I’m now ‘only’ about 18,000 words from the end. There’s no getting away from it: studying is hard. It uses up a lot of time you don’t have, forces you to read books you don’t really understand, all the time enduring the joy of your marker’s comments.
I began my studies at Cliff College a few years ago on the diploma course in a group made up of people in paid roles, but also heroic people in voluntary positions who understood that vocational ministry is not about being paid or not. None of us had the time to do it, and all of us had our struggles getting through the course, but we all did it and are better children’s workers for it.
So what’s the point of training if it’s difficult, time consuming and sometimes humbling? Why am I so keen to badger as many of you who will listen to get yourself a qualification in children’s ministry up to as highest level possible? The reason is simple: it will transform your ministry, and if enough of us step up, then it will gradually transform children’s ministry too. A course of study will get you thinking in a way that nothing else will. You will be forced to engage with ideas in a deeper way than you ever have before, you’ll have to read books you wouldn’t have normally read and even challenge your beliefs and values with other people’s ideas that oppose your views. Going through that process will change you deeply because you’ll become a reflective practitioner, who is able to think about why you do things the way you do them, and help lead us into the children’s ministry of the future we all want to find.
