About Simon Shutt

I recently spent the day with a couple of classes of Year 2 children running an RE day with the following title; ‘If I could ask God a question it would be….’ The day covered many different aspects around this theme and towards the end of the day the children were able to fire their questions at me.

What questions could I expect? Would I have an answer? Could I explain the doctrine of the Trinity if asked or unpack the Christological mystery in appropriate language?

Those who have worked with children will instantly realise that these are not the questions that are important to a six-year-old, nor was it about having the answer or even an answer. It was about allowing the questions to be voiced, acknowledged and considered. The rules were simple, they could ask anything about God but I might say I didn’t know. The value of these times is in bringing into the open deep thoughts and questions about God that often haven’t been formulated into a one sentence enquiry before. As this is done so their presuppositions about God were revealed. The children were very happy to accept that God existed and that He could be everywhere, all the time, all at once. This concept was hard to visualise but fine to be believed. The issues for these children were based around how they could visualise God and understand His beginning.

Who made God?  was a popular question and What did he look like? Did he have golden hair? Where was he standing when he made the world? How old was he? These and other similar questions started to show what was important to these children. These are children whose thinking is still very literal and concrete. Fantasy and reality are all one and so their need to see God in ways that they had experience of and could relate to started to come to the surface. Seeing God in anthropomorphic terms – having two hands, two eyes, two ears etcetera helped them understand the nature of God and it was very apparent this was not an abstract idea of how they could characterise God but a literal way of thinking that God was like them. Once again it struck me how important it is to talk to children about Jesus and allow the stories of the Gospels to be told, as this is how children will see and be able to engage with God.

Six-year-olds are very egocentric. The world revolves around them and what they have experienced at home, school and the wider world is what they think is normal for everyone everywhere. The most striking question for me was voiced by a quieter child who was using their world view to imagine God.

Does God have a mummy?

The answer to this question doesn’t lie in considering the alpha and omega concepts of Revelation or in considering the inter-relationship of the Trinity personhood. The question is all about the importance of mummy to a six-year-old. The one who cares for them, protects them, provides all they need. The one who will comfort them when they are hurt and listen to them when they are afraid. So if this is their experience of mummy then who would do all of those things for God? It was beyond their ability to comprehend or accept that God didn’t have a mummy yet once again the powerful image of Jesus and his mother Mary were useful to these children to know God was OK and safe while still being able to be the creator and sustainer of the universe.

Maybe there was something I could learn from these young lives. Perhaps I should formulate my questions and speak them out to reveal how I see God.

At first glance this title would appear to be an oxymoron, a contradiction in itself.

How can we be strategic in our planning with children’s work and ministry while being random and spontaneous?

When planning is so constrained and organised that there is no room to engage with the unexpected then we risk stifling the child’s issue of the moment or the question that has risen in their thinking.

Our programmes need to be well prepared and thought through; inspired of God; superbly resourced with activities and timetabled to flow seamlessly to a climax. Time needs to have been spent thinking, considering, wrestling and praying into our short time with our children in their groups on a Sunday morning. So we most definitely need to be strategic and well planned as sloppy prep leads to a devaluing of children and a session that will be little more than keeping the ‘kids’ amused. [Read more...]

Much of my work takes me into primary schools to conduct Collective Acts of Worship and teaching of RE in a cross curricular, multi media way. The majority of children with whom I work have no faith background and this challenges me to use appropriate and accessible language. This language needs to be appropriate for their age and levels of understanding while introducing them to a new set of words that they may never have experienced as they belong to the Christian community – or do they?

In recent decades we have actively sought to simplify our religious language to allow more people, regardless of age, to access the truth of the gospel. Consider for a moment whether you heard the word, ‘Resurrection’ over Easter of whether you were offered explanatory phrases such as Jesus has risen, Jesus rose from the dead, He is alive etc. all are good and helpful and appropriate but they have started to replace the word Resurrection as opposed to embellish it. [Read more...]

This was a question from a nine-year-old boy, asked of me during ‘hot seat’ question time on an RE teaching day at his school. It was no philosophical enquiry to try and catch me out but his genuine attempt to get his head around the creation act. He was happy to accept that God existed and that He created the world. The issue for him wasn’t the order of events or the amount of time taken to do it. But he was trying to imagine God doing it, seeing it, feeling it and in so doing was interpreting God in physical anthropomorphic terms.

Attributing human and physical qualities to God is not uncommon, and readily found in scripture, but for this child it was an unhelpful vantage point in getting to grips with who this creator God was. It would have been easy for me to freeze in terror at the question, or scramble to offer a clever closed answer, but I recognised not only did this question not have an absolute answer but that it wasn’t needed. This question was one that looked for help to unlock the nature of God, one of discovery not of empirical fact.

In our churches, Sunday by Sunday, we have become adept at imparting the core information of the Bible story, its meaning and the application in the lives of the children sat before us. But once these young ones return to the big wide world we may not have equipped them to journey with their faith to ask the ‘discovery’ type questions.

The teaching of RE in primary schools offers the church some useful insights into this matter. There are two attainment targets that govern these lessons; Attainment Target 1 (AT1) - learning about religion and imaginatively named Attainment Target 2 (AT2) – learning from religion. The facts and figures of AT1 are what we do well in our Sunday groups but the ‘so what’ questions of AT2 are not so easily dealt with.

AT2 concerns the reflective questions and moments which often make us smile and wonder ourselves, the questions of discovery that show a forward movement in the faith of the child before us. Sadly too many adults have their faith sorted and completed and have stopped asking any more discovery questions. However, we do need to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bath water - teaching the facts and figures is vital to inform our reflection. So let’s continue to tell stories, and provide the platform on which to pose the big questions about God.

The typical, ‘I wonder’ questions of Godly Play can be useful here. It’s good to allow ourselves to be vulnerable and say that we have wrestled with these questions and found no simple answers. Leaving things dangling can leave us feeling we are inadequate or ill-prepared, but this openness is very attractive to children who are trying to make sense of the world and all its claims. It’s good to offer our own understanding and interpretation but add the caveat that this is where we have reached in our thinking so far.

In a world where only that which can be measured is measured, anything that doesn’t fall neatly into a box is often ignored or belittled. As school curriculums become increasingly prescriptive, recent changes in Ofsted inspection criteria have lost the section which concerns the wellbeing of the child. This leaves an even greater need to offer children a safe environment, somewhere they can explore their questions of faith, ask why and not what. If all you do this Sunday morning is to chat about your children’s odd questions then that will be time well spent.

So where was God standing when He made the world? What would you say to that question?