Serving for the Future
It’s easy to think that when we are serving schools, we need to be looking for the need that is current, the one that needs to be filled right now and reap near instant results. But sometimes filling a need can be preemptive of what might be useful for the future, and what could benefit the community and the school in the long run.
Kings Church in Inverness is one example of serving and supporting the young people in the schools by setting them up with skills for the future. Chris Dowling (co-pastor of Kings Church) has seen the benefit of equipping young people for the future through activities like work experience and running a CAP money course. “Young people getting into work isn’t the end of the story” he says when talking about the importance of setting them up for life well by teaching them to deal with incoming pay. He goes on to say that one of the ways we can make a community better and more involved is by educating them from the start about the life skills that teachers don’t have the time or expertise to cover in teaching hours.
In-line with this vision, the church set up work experience opportunities for the pupils using the church coffee house, allowing students to get experience of working in a business setting. This experience involved the students getting involved in a ‘business project’ where they researched and then presented their findings on the community awareness of the coffee house. Once they had done this research they were then assigned the job of creating marketing and branding for the coffee house as a way of making the space more known in the local area. This worked in a way that fed into the community project need for the school and was missional for the church in spreading their reach wider in the community.
Before all of this developed there was very little involvement with the school, which all changed when a new headteacher started at the school who was keen on making more opportunities with employability. It is clear that one change in management or change in focus at a school can create big opportunities and allow a church community to fill a need that is prominent to the school in that moment. Perhaps one of the important things in this scenario is that the church was aware and ready to make changes in this direction with the school.
To take things even further, an exciting aspect of these changes is that these relationships have also been significant in creating a broader conversation about what after-school life looks like for young people in the Highlands, and how schools can be nurturing that in the best way. The demand that teachers are under to support the young people creates an openness to new resources and can allow a space for the church to build a relationship with the school through this need. “We are just here to help and serve the local community, but we are now building good relationships through that” Chris reflects, and perhaps that’s what it is all about: serving for the future through the building of good relationships.
