Mel's Blog Post- Hub Assignment 2

During the first training day I was able to watch how the FiS team shared their faith with the children in the lesson. This came in different ways whether through the main teaching sections, or when they were working with the groups and were sometimes able to share parts of their own personal testimony. The openness I witnessed to hearing about Christianity from the children was something that really surprised me as they were obviously all from different faith backgrounds themselves but they were willing to hear about what Christianity is. Another thing that surprised me was the level of engagement the team had with the children during the lesson. The idea of having 4 members of team in a single lesson seemed like too many to have, but the way they used the team was very clever. The experience for me opened opportunities to be able to approach schools with an option to deliver RS lessons as well as the standard CU or Prayer Space. Seeing how the team were able to hit the RS curriculum points, whilst still maintaining an accurate view of what Christianity really is, opened up pathways in my mind to be able to try and emulate that in my own context. The lesson also showed me a different way of engaging the 95 in things we do in schools which would be interesting to see how it would work in my local area. A challenge I could see with the way the lessons ran was if some volunteers were not committed then that could disrupt the way the lesson went, especially the group activities as you would not be able to have a volunteer per table steering the conversation. Overall though, the training day provided me with a lot of food for though especially as to whether it was religious education or evangelism. I’m still unsure as to where I think this type of work stands as I definitely think it was good quality religious education and could potentially be seen as evangelism in some aspects, but in my opinion a key part of evangelism is the death and resurrection of Jesus. This leaves me unsure of whether lessons like this are evangelism.