groveyouth
As well as educating the next generation, schools are increasingly becoming a catch-all for a host of social issues, as public services struggle to cope with growing demand.
Christians have the opportunity to step into the gap simply by loving and serving their local school. This passionate booklet explains how volunteering can be a visible witness to God’s love, while adding tangible value to the whole learning environment and its spiritual, moral, social and cultural dimensions.
”Matt Brown brings extensive experience in leading youth projects in secondary schools to this publication. He writes persuasively about why the church should get involved with work in schools: the church’s imperative to go out into the community synchronises with school concerns for spiritual, moral, social and cultural development, the required focus on British values, and increasing pressures on the emotional health of young people. He moves on to how the involvement might proceed from the well-established precedents of RE lessons, assemblies and lunch clubs to newer options such as prayer spaces or mentoring. A Grove booklet has space for rationale and recommendation, and both are done well in this edition. Tere is no space for detailed resources. Tere are quite a lot of tips on initial contact, and no more than the briefest of mentions of essential safeguarding, but it is the pointers to useful websites – often in the footnotes – that are really essential to those Readers who will be encouraged by this booklet to start equipping themselves to love and serve their local school.
Rosie MedhurstThe Reader magazine
