Church School
Welcome Back!
Join us on September 12 for our first day of Church School! It's been a long summer, and we're looking forward to being all together again. We have an interesting fall unit for church school and we look forward to sharing with you and having you share with us as we explore the the curiuos book of Job.
Please join us for the gala celebration of our coming together again on September 12. Bring a friend and enjoy the excitement of a full sanctuary, a full choir and a full helping of autumnal anticipation!
Our Fall Unit
We are g
oing to start the year with a long unit on The Book of Job, which may seem like an odd choice for church school if all you are know about Job, is that "God and Satan decided to test Job," or the formidable "patience of Job," or the distressing ending according to the King James Version Bible where Job repents by "despising himself."
We hope to break open some of the myths and misperceptions about Job and to use it as a springboard for storytelling and for talking about stories and their importance. Why are stories so important to our lives as people of God? What makes this particular ancient story so enduring? We tell stories about the most important and deepest aspects of our lives. What does the story of Job reveal about aspects of life about which our children may be concerned -- fairness, bad days, courage.
Because the book does not lend itself to verse by verse conversation, (like last year's unit on the Beatitudes) each week the children will approach these questions through various activities: we'll read other stories (like Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, for example), we'll draw, we'll look at other people's art (like William Blake's pictured above), we'll play-act and generally have great fun telling stories!
We think it is important for you to familiarize yourself with the Book of Job, but we also recognize that the book may be a bit inaccessible for you. One of the resources we've used in preparing for this unit is a newish translation by Stephen Mitchell. To give a flavor of his translation we've made a few sections available for you to download, including the first part of Mitchell's introduction that gives a brief and powerful argument for reading and studying The Book of Job and his Notes on the Text which explain in some more detail why his version looks so different from the versions you might be used to reading. From the actual Book of Job, the downloadable pdf document includes the Prologue, the Curse and the First Round of Argumentation before skipping to the end of the book where Mitchell's translation makes it worth the price of admission. Enjoy.
I can't wait to get started! See you there...