Summary: Religious Education (RE) Committees

Conversation Circles: October 2024

Serving on a committee is a contribution to the meeting, a spiritual practice and a way to be truly present with Friends. While adult education is important in the life of a meeting, this conversation will focus on the committee that holds concern for a meeting’s ministry to children and families. If the meeting has a paid coordinator or youth minister, the children’s RE committee may offer discernment on curriculum, support to staff and assistance with program implementation. When a meeting’s RE program relies solely on volunteers, the committee is directly responsible to ensure that volunteers are in place and provided with curriculum and supplies to work with children and youth. Either way, service on the RE committee is a calling to nurture spiritual growth among Friends of all ages.

Join this conversation to share experiences, challenges, and practices for Quaker RE committees.

Queries:

How does participating in the RE committee affect your spiritual life?
How can the RE committee best support a Meeting’s ministry to children and families?
How do committee roles differ when the RE program is all volunteer compared to those facilitated by paid staff?
How can the committee help ground the RE program in Quaker faith and practice?
How can the committee help weave the RE program into the meeting as a whole and connect to the local community?

Tuesday Conversation Starters

Melinda Wenner Bradley, West Chester FM (PhYM):

Tuesday Conversation Starters

Melinda Wenner Bradley, West Chester FM, PhYM: Care for Children and families is the work of the whole meeting. Collaboration across committees, especially when there are fewer Friends to serve, creates deeper connection and authentic response to needs. It is important to un-silo the meeting’s support for children and families. I remain hopeful that the interruption of the pandemic will allow us to look at things in new ways; that we will ask, “Where are the connections between each committee and the work of supporting caring for children and families?” Examples:

– Worship & Ministry can look at preparing the meeting and families for children to participate in worship. (Students at Quaker Schools often spend more time in worship than children who attend Quaker Meetings.)

– Building and Grounds committees can look at how our Meeting spaces are set-up and welcoming for children, and the unspoken messages of welcome and access we are sending to families with our buildings and grounds.

– Care and Counsel Committee can be thinking about pastoral care of parents and caregivers. The surgeon general’s most recent report names being a parent as a health risk. Pastoral care for children starts with pastoral care for their primary caregivers. Religious education for youth and children is a ministry and RE leaders/teachers are often absent for worship so how can we provide care and support their ministry?

– Look to what your yearly meeting’s Faith and Practice says about Religious Education for guidance and affirmation for the RE committee. PYM Faith and Practice advices and queries about youth religious education can be distilled to the themes of Belonging | Preparation | Formation.

– How can we encourage Friends to see the container of the whole meeting as a foundation for religious education in our meeting?

Cameron Hughes Svedlow, Goose Creek Meeting, (BYM), In our meeting, every committee takes turns volunteering in FDS and the meeting encourages teens to join a committee. The meeting’s involvement in the wider community is very attractive to young people and families. Activities like bike recycling and participating in the Pride Parades create visibility and are activities that young people can get involved in. Toddlers and elementary staff are paid, and parents are developing a relationship with them and lean on their expertise.

Conversation:

Paid RE staff: A Friend requested job descriptions, and guidance on the recruitment and interview process. Should paid staff have a background in Quakerism?

Sample job description on QREC website: https://quakerrecollaborative.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Religious-Education-Coordinator-template.pdf

Does your RE committee supervise paid RE coordinator or is there a personnel committee to supervise any paid staff (such as a caretaker or others)

The biggest advantage of paying people is to free parents to do other things in the life of the meeting.

A meeting with First Day School twice per month has three age groups. All staff are paid members and attenders of the meeting. They also recently added a requirement for there to be a second adult to support paid staff. They ask how other meetings recruit second adults.

Standard practice is to have 2 people present at all times for child safety reasons. A meeting hired a couple members to staff the nursery and oldest kids. Members of the RE committee lead the elementary class. They would like to think about how we engage whole meeting in the work.

If the Meeting is renovating the building, keep in mind that windows between classrooms can help stretch adult volunteers by providing line of site between classrooms.

One meeting has 3 paid people. Two are not members of the meeting but have been around a long time. One is a high school graduate who attended meeting as a young person. By having paid people who have relationships and behavior management skills, volunteers on RE committee feel free to focus on curriculum development. There are so many people in the meeting who have a lot to offer, and paid staff can help some of them feel confident to share their expertise as volunteers.

A Friend lifted up that it is vital to have a paid staff person be in relationship with the RE committee and the whole meeting. Not only for guidance and supervision, but relationship and spiritual connection.

Weaving the meeting together: Can hiring a staff person further silo the concerns of young people and families?

Yes, and part of my job and my ministry as paid staff is to do my best to not let that happen, to be vocal about the importance of integrating young people and families in the life of our meeting.

I’ve wondered if having paid staff sometimes leads to the rest of the meeting feel like they are “off the hook” for FDS, making it harder to get volunteers to work with the paid staff person. I don’t know if this is a thing or not, but I’ve wondered.

Good point, but if we are reminding the rest of the meeting of other opportunities when they can be involved, they are not in fact “off the hook” — this discussion of how to involved / engage the whole meeting is essential.

We want to weave the Meeting together. Love the idea of asking members of other committees to volunteer for FDS, and weaving teenagers in by having them be paid nursery staff. Once parents and children get to know them, they often become babysitters for meeting community members. What we do in RE isn’t super complicated, it just may be a new language, a religious language that might not come easily or right away to everyone. We can support committee members to learn.

Thinking about your “why” for RE in your meeting is so important, because if your why is to allow parents to attend worship, then maybe what you need is a childcare program. If your why is to deepen children’s spiritual practices, then you are called to plan program.

Engaging the whole meeting in ministry to young people and families. My meeting is very vital and very aged. Been moved by Kristina Keefe Perry’s work around intergenerational semi programmed worship. The meeting has been following Cambridge Meeting’s model of monthly intergenerational worship – which is better attended than First Day School. Instead of having intergenerational meeting in smaller or outdoor space and waiting worship in main meeting room the two programs were recently switched. That has also had a symbolic impact. The meeting has not been seeing kids at the center of the life of the meeting, and as a result there are very few families. We are trying to switch that.

Kristina Keefe-Perry is a member of Fresh Pond Mtg in Boston and is a host of our newest NEYM meeting called Three Rivers.

Family Worship Pamphlet at Friends Mtg of Cambridge (very specific description of their monthly intergenerational semi-programmed services) https://neym.org/sites/default/files/2024-09/Family-Worship-Pamphlet-Whole8.2.19.pdf

Including Children in Worship: When thinking about inviting children and new people to Waiting Worship please consider providing an inclusion box with quiet fidgets, books, notebooks and writing tools. It helps children, and also some adults, sit in the silence.

We have those items for the “inclusion box” in small tote bags and I’ve seen experienced children bring a bag to a new child

There are meetings who are creating a children’s corner in the meeting room with a low table, art supplies, and picture books. This story from PYM shares some of those ideas in action.

The question of children being included in worship is the key to the future of Quakerism. We need to acknowledge and address anxieties of all parties: parents’ anxieties that their kids will be disruptive, and meeting members’ and attenders’ anxieties that the quality of their worship will be impacted by the presence of young people. It is not just the experiential learning of how to worship by being in worship that is so important, but it is also providing young people with the experience that there is a place for them in worship, that worship is for them, too. They are welcome even with their wiggles, whispers, etc.

Teen Program: A meeting hosts monthly Fellowship Sundays with a program for teens that specifically makes Quakerism applicable for teenagers by inviting speakers on conscientious objection, having jobs with Quaker organizations, and activism work. The program gives them the opportunity to connect what happens in meeting to the rest of their lives.

Thursday Conversation Starters

Sallie Jones, Birmingham PA Friends Meeting (PYM): The practices I use as the clerk of my meeting’s “Children and Youth Program Committee” (CYP) that ground us as a something more than a committee include:
- Beginning our meetings with a query or a time to check in with one another,
- Having a potluck dinner together at the meetinghouse once a year, and
- Writing a list of aspirations together that guide our work. This year the list of aspirations is:
The CYP Committee helps weave the C&Y program into the meeting as a whole in several ways:
- Our Youth (middle school and high school) have 3 kinds of activities.
Two quotes I find valuable to keep a healthy balance and perspective about my service to my meeting:
- “Can I do “this” with a glad heart?” (If not, why not; what needs to change?)
- “Let each of us do well what we can with the gifts we have been given.” (I think this is about finding the right job for each person in the meeting.)
Andrew Wright, Durham Friends Meeting, NCYMC

Before we had staff, the RE committee was comprised of First Day School teachers. The meeting agenda consisted of deciding who would teach when, and how to recruit additional teachers.

Now that I am the children & youth staff, we try to relieve teachers of the double duty to serve on the committee. The committee is now considering how to integrate children into worship. We were doing a Godly Play or Faith & Play story at the beginning of worship on a quarterly basis as part of intergenerational worship.

We now have paid high schoolers in each class who work with adult volunteers. We define their role and train them.

The committee’s role has shifted to discerning the Meeting’s ministry to children, youth and families. Lesson planning now happens outside of the committee. As staff, I prepare lesson plans and supplies so teachers can walk right in.

Melinda Wenner Bradley:

Too often RE committees are siloed when actually, the whole meeting has care of children and parents who are part of the meeting community. The RE committee should call upon the meeting to discern the “why” of the children’s program. The answer will shape the program. She recommends this Looking Ahead Guide, to help RE committees and staff plan the meeting’s program for children and youth (maybe with the whole meeting!). Collaboration across committees can create deeper connections, and an authentic response to the needs of children & youth. Parents and families are under tremendous stress these days, so much so that the Surgeon General has recently stated that parenting is a health risk factor.

The interruption caused by the pandemic can allow us to step into new ways of doing things. An RE committee can provide leadership to the whole meeting to truly include children. The committee with care of worship can decide that all-ages worship is important for the meeting.

Melinda also lifted up this Minute of “Travel” for those who work in the RE program, to acknowledge that the people who are supporting children & youth are doing a ministry and often don’t get to attend worship. In the past, and often today, this ministry with children has been seen as lesser ministry. With this minute, we are sending forth, as a meeting, these people who tend to the children who are our present and future. It is no less vital than our social ministry and our mystics.

It is important for the paid staff to be truly in relationship with the committee and the whole meeting. Too often it has been “We don’t have the energy. We will just hire someone, and they will take care of it.” But that doesn’t work well. It is important for RE staff to be woven into the pastoral care of the meeting.

Thursday Conversation

Curriculum: Our meeting is in a college town. In the last year we have had a lot of new families with young kids, but families often stay for a few years then they leave unless the parents have jobs in the area. Our RE committee mapped out a three-year cycle of topics we would cover with lessons for successive ages at each cycle. There is one whole semester on worship, on becoming still; one semester on Hebrew scriptures. Some parents with negative childhood experience in church are hesitant and/or resistant to having their children study the Bible. We also do a semester on the testimonies.

Our meeting doesn’t have an RE Committee, but we want to start one. Our lessons cover Jesus, the Bible, Quaker faith & practice, and testimonies. All ages are in one little room. It’s hard to engage such a wide range of ages. So many kids have sports that attendance is intermittent.

After Covid, we met in a single room. We had to work through some behavioral issues linked to covid. Now we have little kids and also teens in a separate room. We tell one story to the whole group, then break into Littles and Bigs for reflection and response. We have one theme for each season with lessons addressing that theme—so we’ve sacrificed depth for repetition in the hopes that the children are receiving some sort of education when they come even sporadically.

Our Meeting does curriculum for September through May. In the summer months we invite any Friend to share their passion. It has worked really well.

Our Meeting has more families than in the recent past, but they come less frequently. We don’t teach scripture in First Day School though we do teach Quaker values and activism though service projects.

Church trauma: Parents and grandparent may come with emotional wounds from previous church experiences, and may resist lessons around the Bible or God.

The pandemic deeply affected middle schoolers because they used to develop a sense of community in retreats, but there were no sleepovers during the pandemic. It was hard to gain momentum as the pandemic lifted. We also had to respond to parents not wanting to separate from their children.

Beyond the scholastic model. As a meeting, consider what are the bigger things we need to address? So many of us deal with a one room schoolhouse. I wonder about how it may be time to move past curriculum to thinking about how to integrate children into the life of the community

One thing I have found helpful in our small meeting where we have one group with ages 4-12: We start by breaking bread together and invite the children to share their joys and concerns. What are some other non-scholastic approaches to helping children focus on each other?

Our classes have become less scholastic. The children like doing art projects. They sit in comfortable places and we just talk. Sometimes we tell stories, and it works.

How can we think beyond the scholastic model to the belonging and formation piece; creating community among the children? The name “Children’s meeting” (rather than First Day School) says there is a community that the children are in together. I’ve been excited about finding ways to engage children in Quaker practices. Listening for the spirit (waiting worship), writing epistles, and practicing Quaker decision making. What about you, what kind of things are you trying out or curious about?

Our meeting has been small, with 7 – 10 adults. Suddenly we have four families. The education committee is about half of our membership. We give parents space to worship, but they have also stepped forward to teach on a rotating basis. The children enter worship for the last 10 minutes. Coming into a centered meeting that is all settled has been profound for all of us. There is a sense of completing our community when the children enter.

Our meeting has a small RE committee, and a children’s program with 5 children ages 6-11. On any given week we have 2-3 children. We have Children’s Meeting for Discovery. We base each month on a query and go in with a plan with a facilitator being someone from RE committee assisted by one other adult volunteer. When the kids come in, we change the plan as needed. We have had great success in grounding our activities in the queries. The children are very close and communicate well with each other. We have been able to develop community among the families that come.

We begin Children’s Meeting for Discovery with a gathering to share an activity the children are excited to share, or are looking forward to, and something that may not be going well. Sometimes one of the children will suggest the topic, and we go with it. Then we have our activity that always has a hands-on element. We close every CMD with a gratitude circle which the kids love.

Here is a link to a copy of the children’s queries on our google doc Children’s Queries and Advices, Oread Friends Meeting

Once per month our meeting has a youth committee. They use Friends’ decision making process to discuss what they want to do and how they can get help from the Meeting. We have started asking the kids about the topics that interest them. They asked about the Bibles, so we give each child a Bible in 5^th grade and Faith & practice in 9^th grade. The other topic they were interested in was the Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP). A Friend talked about his AVP work in the prisons and shared some AVP games, which the kids enjoyed. A Friend finds out when the teens and presenters are available and schedules accordingly.

We recently hosted a pancake breakfast, a collaboration between the Fellowship Committee and the Youth Group. The youth came to meeting early and prepared pancakes, eggs, and other breakfast foods. The teenage boys made all of the pancakes. Newcomers came and everyone had a great time.

How have your RE committees organized to implement a new way of looking at things?

We have youth Meeting for Business and third Sundays are All Ages (intergenerational) Worship.

Cambridge Meeting: the children usually meet in the basement and are invisible to the Meeting. We had a children’s art show upstairs in the hall with an opening for the whole meeting. It was very well attended and helped adults appreciate the children as individuals. During Covid we had an outdoor covid-friendly Halloween party.

How have you involved the parents? We do not expect parents to teach. The Meeting is their time to nurture their own spiritual walk. We have a Google sign-up sheet for Meeting adult volunteers to sign up to work with young Friends. We announce the need for teachers and say that we want parents to be able to worship as they need.

Kids don’t drive themselves to meeting. Pastoral care for parents is SO important.

The young adult Friends (age 18 – 40) group in our meeting had a retreat in the spring. They realized that the parents are in this age group and are working to include them. Our youth had business meeting with the kids. They made things to sell at our Christmas party to give to organizations.

Since COVID, how many meetings have new families coming in? It is important that the first time families come with children that the children have a good experience. Make sure the child feels accepted. Families who come for the first time are testing it out. I’m hearing that families are coming back when they feel that their children are being supported.

One way to help families feel your welcome is to create a space in the worship room for children to be present: https://www.pym.org/making-spaces-for-children-in-worship/

RESOURCES

QREC Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/Quakers4RE/

And Facebook group, Valiant Together: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ValiantTogetherQuakerRE/

Children’s Queries and Advices, Oread Friends Meeting

Committees of the Meeting, Religious Education, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting

Family Worship Pamphlet, Friends Meeting of Cambridge

First Day School Committee, Friends Meeting at Cambridge

First Day School Curriculum Coordinator Job Description, Albuquerque Friends Meeting

Looking Ahead Guide, by Melinda Wenner Bradley

Making Spaces for Children in Worship, Melinda Wenner Bradley, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting

Reflections on Clerking a Quaker Committee, by Storm Evans, Friends Journal, April 1, 2011

Supporting the Ministry of Children’s Religious Education, Melinda Wenner Bradley, QREC video

Why Quakers Value Process Over Outcome with Dorsey Green, QuakerSpeak

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Summary: Religious Education (RE) Committees

Conversation Circles: October 2024

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