What else can we be doing?
If you already have significant involvement in a school community, proactively looking for other ways to be involved with that school or other schools in the area is not always easy. But perhaps it’s always good to be asking the question: what else can we be doing here?
Newton Means Baptist Church (NMBC) has significant involvement with a number of different schools in the area. But an important aspect of all their involvement is that it doesn’t necessarily look the same in every school. As the needs in one school are completely different from the next, it is really important to meet them with what they need where they are. For instance, some of NMBCs involvement with their local primary school has been as simple as helping with the Bikeability training course when they required more adult volunteers. However, in the local high school, it has been more important to have more curricular focused contributions, such as what the church can contribute to assemblies or classrooms lessons, therefore benefiting the school on an educational level.
Perhaps the most exciting recent contribution has been what the church has been able to contribute to a new primary school in the area, Maiden Hill Primary. Adrienne Cartwright, the Youth and Children’s Worker at NMBC, reflects on how one of most important questions they asked in the lead up to the school opening was: “As a church, how do we get involved?” Through this experience it is clear that they were very intentional about looking for where they could support the school as a church community, and this support has come out in many different forms. Firstly, they baked for the teachers on their Inservice day to show their support and care for them in this new environment. Secondly, they organized a fun day event for the children attending the new school before the term actually started and had an overwhelming attendance of over 200 people! This was a really encouraging event as it provided a community for the new families attending the new school, before the physical community had actually been established at school. They have also been actively looking for other ways they can support the school through providing resources for the teachers where they are perhaps lacking in what they need. Adrienne states that they simply see these opportunities to serve as “another way of blessing the community and showing them love”.
It can be easy when something new is starting to hold back, but perhaps our real power is in being intentional about offering support. Not just looking for where the gaps might be, but simply asking where you can help and seeing what you could do that would create more community for the local area. So the question stops becoming, where are we going to build, and instead, how can we build on what we are already doing?
