Experience Easter 2012

Some images from the two days of station staffing with S1 in Dunoon Grammar School. I'll hopefully have a few more with some of the kids once we get permissions etc. sorted from the school. We live and work in a well-regulated environment, designed to protect vulnerable people (and ourselves) but the gospel has this habit of escaping out from amongst the constraints and limitations.

And long may it do so!

The last supper - with bread and 'wine'

Sharing our Sorrows - one particular take on atonement - but one that boys love for the gory story!

The tomb - with folded clothes and a (low energy) light for effect...

Lent - but Easter Experienced!

The last two days (well, last few weeks) have been an odd mixture of the start of Lent and ramping up for a local schools project - Experience Easter!

People from local churches took a set of stations into Dunoon Grammar School for the first year to experience interactively the Holy Week and Easter story. I've done it quite a few times down south, generally in primary rather than secondary schools - so this was a challenge to get it running in a new context, in a secondary school and in much shorter, packaged periods.

I'm sure I'll blog or reflect more on the event itself, the press coverage, the start of an ecumenical flavour in pulling it together, the plans for repeats in the future (and other similar projects for other seasons). But for tonight, I want to record one of the most profound incidents.

When we came in just before 9 this morning to start the second day, the gym was in complete darkness, except for the light inside the empty tomb. I was surprised, as I thought we had switched it off the night before. But it was busy, things are easily overlooked.

In the mid morning break, one of the school cleaners popped in, and apologised for having switched the light on - when they came into the gym early in the morning they had felt the urge to switch the light on inside Jesus' empty tomb, and to spend a quite ten minutes or so, surrounded by the Holy Week stations, just quietly reflecting.

The flows of people around us and our churches, and the ways that ripples set out in ways that we can anticipate - these never cease to amaze me.

Bungee-minister

First secondary school assembly! Even now, that my leaving has been announced (date tbc) and I am going to leave curacy behind, firsts can still appear. Not that that should be a surprise, of course.

The place: Christ College, West Cheltenham
The cast: Year 9 (just after lunch)
The subject: Talking with God

Majority show of hands and heckles that one cannot have a conversation with God. No response to their own views on where to pray.

Their response to 6 minute potted This-Is-Andrew-Swift-and-his-journey-from-there-to-here-involving-conversations-God. Not too much - as far as one could see. The seeds are scattered, the bungee-minister twangs back out of the context, probably never to return.

The staff liked the panoramic view of Dunoon and the Clyde...