Immortal, invisible . . . and too hard for children to sing?
by Julian Mann, TCW:
MY article last Sunday in TCW on the Church of England’s National Education Conference, C of E’s schools shindig – gypsies, travellers but precious little Jesus, predictably did not go down too well with the Church House, Westminster, communications team.
Their head of news told me that it was ‘a little glimpse into an alt-right alternative reality where the narrative that everything is a woke plot must be repeated, irrespective of the facts’.
John Bingham, a former religious affairs editor of the Telegraph, even wondered whether he and I were at the same conference at the Union Chapel in Islington on January 27. I am grateful to him for engaging, so I am continuing the conversation.
Surely it was a deliberate choice by the conference organisers and by the teachers involved to have C of E school children singing pop songs and performing a ballet to an audio of parts of Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech in front of the Secretary of State for Education, Gillian Keegan, and the Children’s Commissioner for England, Rachel de Souza. Was it impossible to have had children giving a Bible reading and singing a traditional hymn with solid biblical content?
When I served as a vicar for 19 years in a C of E parish in South Yorkshire, my wife encouraged primary school-age children in the congregation to give readings from the Dramatised Bible at church services and Christmas and Easter events.
It sticks faithfully to the text but enables children to read out the words spoken by the characters in the biblical stories with the narrator reading the links. Of course, such public readings required work in preparation and practice. But the exercise got children reading the Bible and taught them biblical truth, particularly from the Gospel narratives.
Why could this not have been done for the children performing on stage from C of E schools at the conference?
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