Resource on Trial: The Treasure Box People

Price : Monthly, £10 a box

Who is it for? Families to use at home

How long is each session? Each box is one story and contains a couple of hours’ worth of material

One of the issues that we, as churches, are yet to face up to is how we support spirituality in the home. Evidence points towards parents feeling increasingly disempowered to talk about God with their children and increasingly looking towards churches and schools to meet that need. It is clear though that unless faith is part of family life its nurture becomes more difficult, no matter how hard the Church might work at it. So I was excited to hear about a resource that seemed like a good idea and might be part of the solution to this problem.

The basic idea is that for a monthly fee of £10 you get sent a box of resources to use with your family to help you focus on a Bible story. The quality of the contents was high and although £10 feels expensive, you have to accept that you pay a premium to have someone do the legwork of collating all the resources. Ours was focused on the lost sheep and contained a story book, resources to make a sheep, a knitting kit, a postcard made from sheep poo and a sheet of paper with pictures of sheep on. I tried it out with my daughter, who is seven and is therefore right in the middle of the target age group for the resource, aimed as it is at seven to nine year-olds.

The very presence of the box in our house was exciting; my daughter really wanted to open it and see what was inside. Once we got the box open I found actually using it as a resource quite tricky, essentially when confronted by a load of craft resources and a story book, my daughter just wanted to do the craft as quickly as possible! We did read the story, in fact she was able to read it herself, but we did have regular pauses to ask if she could make a sheep yet. When we finally made the sheep it was just a construction project where all our attention was on making that sheep. It was hard to have a conversation about the story as all our focus was on getting the sheep right. When we’d finally made it, and decided not to trim the rather long legs (her choice) we didn’t ever quite restore our momentum and go back to the story. We did do the prayer card but she wasn’t that interested.

There were clearly a few weaknesses in the pack, it’s a bit like a Sunday school in a box and sadly it’s a bit of an old-fashioned one. The box has a story and then craft related to the story, what it lacks is elements that help the family explore the meaning of the story; so they can discover it for themselves. For this product to really fulfil its potential, it needs to address these issues. If it does, it has the potential to be something quite exciting. All it would need is a more simple craft idea and few open-ended questions to talk about while you’re doing it, and you could see all kinds of exciting conversations around the table being explored together.

This is a really good idea and one that has the potential to be a real asset to support faith in homes, but it’s not quite there yet.

Main strength

The idea is a good one. Lives are busy and so something that does a lot of work for you and helps you to talk about Bible stories with your children is good. Also the production quality is high.