Musings from the conference
Our Director, Emily, attended the Perth Children’s Ministry Convention recently and the theme this year was Friends with Jesus – The plan from the very beginning with Fiona Millar. It unpacked the Old Testament and how we should be teaching it to our young people.
See below as Emily shares some of her musings from the convention. This event has inspried the creation of some new resources so watch out for what’s coming soon!
See below for some of Emily’s key insights from the day.
Song of Songs as a basis for Relationships and Sexuality Education
Fiona took us on a journey through the Old Testament with many, many teaching opportunities using story. Story is my favourite way to teach and so I was hooked!
Now Fiona didn’t actually say to use Song of Songs as a basis for sex ed per se. However she did talk about about how it has a lot to teach us about relationships and sex, reminding us that God created sex. So this got me thinking, and I came home and googled – “song of songs” starting point for relationships and sex ed curriculum – you migth be surprised to find out their were not any curriculums or programs using song of songs to teach sex ed! There were some bible study guides on the book and a debate online about the book being about God and the Church but not actually about sex (not sure you could argue it is not about sex if you read it!). I do agree there is the metaphor of God loves his church like man loves his wife, but I think the book of Song of Songs is also celebrating relationships, marriage and sex.
Fiona explained that the books from Job to Psalms are the wisdom books (Song of Songs included) and these books help us to have faith in Jesus using our heads, hearts and hands. These books teach us cognitively about the logic and truth of the gospel, they draw us to the beauty of Jesus and they motivate us to do what God says. I am going to read Song of Songs with this framework in mind and see what it tells us about how we should be teaching Relationships and Sexuality Education.
Watch this space, I am going to do a deep dive here and see what I can come up with!
Emotional Intelligence from the Psalms
Fiona explained many reasons why we should teach the Psalms to children and one of them was to help us process emotions. She encouraged us to explore emotions such as Fear, Joy and Sadness in the Psalms and use this as a way to heop children understand emotions. One example she gave was to have children identify the emotions in the Psalms and then consider how they feel – and then take their emotions to God in prayer. A powerful way to process emoptions and also ask for God’s help to shift them or make sense of them.
Now, when I googled this one a lot more information came up. I will give you a few here to get you started:
- The Psalms and Emotion
- Use the Psalms to Teach Kids About Feelings
- How the Psalms Teach the Christian about Emotion
This got me thinking that we could do this better in Health Education in schools. Let’s try out some different ways to teach emotions in our Health classes using Psalms!
Social Justice and Community with the Prophets
Have you taught about the Prophets in Health Ed?
Neither have I. But we can and should. In our last session for the convention, we explored the Prophets and Fiona showed us that the Prophets teach us Judgement and Rescue. They point out how we are not living according to God’s way and they Point us forward to how we should live – and this usually relates to how we treat other people.
I am reminded to dig into the Old Testament a bit more when planning Health Education for the Christian School. Not only do the Prophets show us holy living, they do it using story! I will be looking for some Prophet stories that link to our social justice and community themes in Health Ed. Watch this space.
