show and tell?

I am a (very) part-time chaplain at Essex University. Today I took part in a ‘Learning at Work’ day at the Uni. The best way I can think of to describe it is that it is a grown-up version of ‘show and tell’. Now that is underplaying it badly, but the idea is that if you have a passion / skill / interest you can offer to share that with other University employees throughout the day.

I offered to give some advice and training on learning and performing magic tricks. Amazingly a few people decided that they wanted to attend the session so this morning I spent an hour and a half with half-a-dozen people from different departments of the University exploring some of the principles of magic tricks, teaching some simple moves and offering some advice, as well as showing off some of my tricks.

I felt it went okay – nobody fell asleep and all said nice things at the end. On reflection I did not invite them to say who they are (oops) and should have given much more opportunity for them to ask questions / make observations. Even though they learnt some tricks it was not as interactive as it should have been.

But on my way to the University I had an epiphany. (It didn’t hurt!) I realised that this is a good analogy of how churches work. We all bring our skills, experiences, personality and talents and share them with one another. We can all learn from one another. That is part of what Baptist Christians mean by ‘the priesthood of all believers’. We believe that God can and does speak to us as a gathered community through anyone and everyone who is there. That’s Church Meetings / Congregational governance at its best.

And… great summary of how we share our faith could be ‘show and tell’ – show the difference Jesus makes in your life and tell people about it too. Perhaps we need new words for the classic ‘Go, tell it on the mountains…’

“Show and tell it in the workplace, in our homes and everywhere…”

Join in at the back!

A teacher invited her class to bring in something that related to their faith for ‘show and tell’

A Jewish girl brought in a candlestick and spoke about Hannukah (Festival of Light)

A Hindu lad brought in a statue of one of their gods and spoke about their prayer rituals.

A Baptist lad brought in a pale green plate and spoke about ‘Bring and Share lunches’!