Collective Worship and Growing Faith
Last updated:Church schools owe their existence to the vision of Joshua Watson and the founding of the National Society, and their trust deeds to the foresight of past church communities. The local church community, through its foundation and ex officio governors, are inheritors and guardians of the school’s historic trust deed. This involves honouring tradition while re-imagining how this might look today. Today this has found new expression in the ‘Growing Faith adventure’.
‘Growing Faith’ promotes a partnership between the three local communities of church, school and household to provide space to talk of faith & spiritual matters or ask challenging questions within and between these three communities.
Three principles exemplify this approach:
- Connected Communities: looking for meaningful community connections in the intersection between church, school and household.
- Encounters with God: encountering faith and belief by engaging in conversations about God as individuals and together.
- Imaginative practices: searching for ‘a new way of being church’ and creating new thinking and new doing in relation to children, young people and households.
This has been described as developing ‘faith talk’ in the ‘Faith in the Nexus’ report (8 National Institute for Christian Research in Education, Christchurch Canterbury , Faith in the Nexus, (November 2020) Faith In The Nexus (nicer.org.uk). Specifically, the Church school is a place for ‘faith talk’ where Encounters with God may happen. The ‘Growing Faith adventure is not part of the SIAMS schedule but the local church should normally expect to be part of a church school partnership that encourages and supports the school in effectively developing the impact of and provision for worship. Families can also expect to be partners in collective worship: involved, informed and enabled to collaborate at home if they should wish.