SYNOPSIS
A debut album filled with songs of unrequited love.
INTRODUCTION
This session looks at issues surrounding money, as your young people become more familiar with earning their own money and making choices about how they spend it.
THE SESSION
Begin the session by telling your young people to imagine someone has just given them £1000 to spend on anything they like; how would they spend it? Using magazines, ask your young people to create a quick collage to show how they would spend their money.
Say: it would be great to be given a large amount of money to spend however you like, but that rarely happens. Many of you will be becoming more familiar with the idea of having a job or thinking about what you might like to do in the future. Some jobs, or careers, pay much better than others. You can earn a great deal of money if you set off on a given career path, but is that what it’s really all about?
TRACK: MONEY ON MY MIND (TRACK 1)
Play the track, and provide copies of the lyrics for your young people to follow. Ask your group whether the singer has a place to sing words like this, when he is earning a lot of money by doing so? Help your young people to see that what we are really thinking about here is not just what you can see at a surface level, but rather the motivation behind it. In this song Sam Smith makes it very clear that he is making a career in music because he loves it and that he still wants to keep some control over the things he does, rather than selling out simply to become rich.
Provide Bibles and ask someone to read Matthew 6:19-24. Ask your young people how this relates to the song we heard. What does it mean to see money as a master? How can you identify when someone is ‘serving money’ as a master? How does serving God as ‘master’ change the way we view money?
Say: as you get older, you will have more and more decisions to make about the way you earn money. We should not view money as evil in itself, but rather work to keep a healthy attitude towards it. If we give God the position of boss, it will shape the decisions that we make - from the things that we do to earn money, to the way that we spend it. The Bible has much more advice to follow around this issue and if we want to serve God in the right way, we should be reading the Bible to discover more about the things that we can do to serve him.
