‘Collective Worship in a Church school should enable every child and adult to flourish and to live life in all its fullness. (John 10:10).  It will help educate for wisdom, knowledge and skills, hope and aspiration, dignity and respect, and developing community and understanding of living well together.

Church of England Vision for Education,  ‘Deeply Christian, Serving the Common Good’ Autumn 2016

Introduction

As a Church school, we embrace the opportunity for collective worship as it enables our children and school team to have the opportunity to grow in their understanding of God and of themselves.  It is the heartbeat of our school and is offered as part of a wider opportunity for pupils and adults to encounter faith by engaging in conversations about God, as individuals and together.

Our Christian vision is to create a nurturing community in which we ignite curious minds, encourage generous hearts and embrace a changing world so our children can live life in all its fullness.

This vision, alongside our three core Christian values and biblical underpinning shapes all we do:

“Let all that you do be done in love.” (1 Corinthians 16:14)

Policy Statement and Guiding Principles

At Churchill Primary School collective worship aims to be Inclusive, Invitational, and Inspiring and offers children and adults the opportunity to experience worship and join in, if they wish.

We aim to make all of our worship inclusive by ensuring it involves meeting, exploring, questioning, and responding to others and, for some, to God. We recognise that within our rich community we have many pupils and staff who come from homes of different faith backgrounds as well as of no faith background. Moreover, many pupils will naturally be at different stages of their spiritual journey, during their time in our school. As a result, we ensure that through our collective worship we give our pupils the opportunity to think and ask questions.   We seek to make space to consent, and dissent: to participate and to stand back; and to consider. We take care that the language used by those facilitating worship avoids assuming faith in all those participating, listening and watching.

We recognise that our pupils bring their own experience to worship and actively encourage our pupils (through our school council and in future, pupil chaplains) to be involved in planning, leading and evaluating our worship.

We commit to our collective worship being consistently invitational.  There is no compulsion to ‘do anything’. Rather, our worship is created to provide our pupils with the opportunity to engage whilst allowing the freedom of those of different faiths and those of no religious faith to be present and to engage with integrity.

Pupils and adults are always only invited to pray if they wish to do so, and they are invited to pray in their own way, including the option to reflect.

At Churchill Primary School, pupils and adults can expect the worship they experience to be inspirational. We seek to enable pupils and adults to ask big questions about who we are and why we do what we do.  We hope to motivate pupils and adults into action, into thinking differently, and into reflecting on their and the wider community’s behaviour and actions. As a result of inspirational collective worship, we want our school community to be inspired to become courageous advocates of causes.  School leaders share this poem, written by Saint Mother Teresa, as an underpinning of courageous advocacy.

People are often unreasonable, illogical, and self-centered;

forgive them anyway.

If you do good, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives;

do good anyway.

If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies;

succeed anyway.

Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable;

be honest and frank anyway.

What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight;

build anyway.

If you find serenity and happiness, there may be jealousy;

be happy anyway.

The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow;

do good anyway.

Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough;

give the world the best you’ve got anyway.

You see, in the final analysis, it is between you and God;

it was never between you and them anyway.

Over the last few years, we have been expanding the role of young leaders in the development of our Collective Worship plan.  This year, we have given pupils (from Years 2 to 6 ) the opportunity to be elected by their peers to lead collective worship.

We are extremely proud of our Collective Worship Champions.  They have led some really thoughtful and inspiring services this year, including our thankful harvest service.

Harvest Service

Our collective Worship Champions led a super harvest service, on the first day back of term.  Their aim to collect much needed food for the local foodbanks was a huge success, with over 200 boxes of cereals being donated to school.  They also loved creating their giant domino run, which was enjoyed by all of the school. Whilst having fun, they also spoke about how a true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members.  Christians learn from the Bible that Love is a powerful thing and the following words from the Bible show the impact of love and loving actions: It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. (1 Cor 13:7)